Bush Should Resign

The USA has descended into scenes of barbaric, squalid, violent despair while the whole world watches in amazement.

Here is the much-vaunted "world's only superpower", nearly a week after disaster struck, still totally incapable of providing its citizens with even the most elementary care.

Daily News photographer Mike Appleton and I heard there was a riot under way at the convention center and headed over there.

As we walked past the Windsor Court hotel, we were stopped by a female state trooper. "Y'all came over here without guns? Don't go there. Don't go there unless you have a machine gun around your neck. We pulled our troops out because the civilians have taken over. We don't have the manpower to deal with them," she said.

But Mike and I decided to press on. This is a story the world needs to hear.

We passed a family next - three women and two men - frying chicken on a street corner. One of the men, wearing a 9-inch knife on his belt, wished us luck.

"Y'all better be strapped," he said as we walked by - strapped being slang for armed. The scene at the convention center was wild; the fury palpable. The people looked far more desperate and far more desolate than those at the Superdome.

"There's nobody of authority here," said A.G. Norton, 48. "They left us here under the impression that they weren't going to put us in the Dome because of the conditions there. But what about the conditions here?"

There was no food or water and not a cop or a soldier to be seen. And overnight, I was told, 10 people had died.

I was skeptical of the claim and a man took me to a massive refrigerator in the center's kitchen.

Eight bodies were inside, though there was no power to keep the refrigerator on. I found the other two corpses around the back, on a loading dock.

Worse yet, this was a disaster which people had seen coming for years, a hurricane whose path had been plotted on weather maps for days.

This was a disaster the country had been preparing for. This was one of the disasters most predicted, most feared, most planned for. There was two days of advance warning, as the massive, category 5 hurricane shifted purposefully towards New Orleans. This was no terrorist attack -- this time, there was warning. This time, there was knowledge.

And yet, the much-reshuffled domestic security resculpted as a result of 9-11 simply didn't show up. It wasn't there. FEMA, which has been hacked, shuffled, and gutted in the last few years, proved unable to respond to a catastrophic emergency situation. The catastrophic emergency situation, along the Gulf Coast, the one that sounded the alarms two days before landfall, the one that triggered the warnings of nightmare scenarios known for years in advance, and yet if there was any advance plan at all, any knowledge at all, any fathoming at all of how to respond in the fourty-eight hours most critical for the survival of the victims, it didn't show up. The roads were clogged, the islands were flooded, the levees were breached, and homeland security wasn't there, leaving each state, each town, each police force, each wrecked band of shell-shocked survivors to fend, and make do, while convoys were organized and strategies prepared with seeming obliviousness to the urgency of the numbers and clocks. There is... almost nothing meaningful to say...

We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not. The second disaster, still ongoing, is unforgivable.

That's the only word that comes to mind, a word I keep repeating to myself. These deaths, these men, these women, these infants dying now in these hours didn't have to happen. They did not have to die waiting for convoys to gather outside their city or for reservists to stand alongside their shattered police forces. They did not have to wait in darkness and fear for help to arrive, only to struggle for days without that help ever coming.

This is not politics. This is not partisanship.

This is unforgivable.

Indeed. Because the richest nation on earth has the money, if not to prevent such natural disasters from happenening, at least to be prepared for them. And yet the money has been spent on... other priorities.

A government in the thrall of a totally immoral military-industrial lobby has poured countless billions of dollars - and precious human resources - into an illegal war of choice, based on lies, that is going nowhere is a hurry.

And where is that government today?

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich. Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home. Yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

Bush says this is not the time to "play politics". Indeed.

Play-time is over, George. People are angry at the mess you and your demented goons have created.

It's time to give back the keys to the White House.