President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
With a Little Fat Man with a notepad in his hand
The President say: “Little Fat Man, isn’t it a shame
What the River has done to this poor crackers land
— Randy Newman , Louisiana, 1927
The appalling images of a devastated New Orleans and displaced Americans, a million or more, whose lives, homes, and destinies fell prey to the deadly combination of a Category 5 hurricane and the shameful ineptitude of a deceitful Administration will be with us for a long time to come. And while the President’s top advisors and cabinet–in-recess found themselves embarrassingly preoccupied (Condi Rice buying expensive shoes, just like Imelda, in New York City; Cheney shopping for a three million dollar Chesapeake Bay weekend home; and Rummy glad-handing at a San Diego Padres game) 43, himself, played guitar. Crawford’s own Nero-hero fiddled while the South’s most cosmopolitan and impoverished African American city, a former French colony to boot, became the toxic gumbo capital of the world.
“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response at all levels of government,” said President Bush at a White House news conference, two days after a 9/11 memorial, “and to the extent that the federal government didn’t do its job right, I take responsibility.”
That’s quite a mea culpa. Apparently laissez-faire, crony capitalism does not mean “let’s roll” much less laissez les bons temps rouler. Methinks, for Bush, taking responsibility means “let’s roll over.” Notice his roll call of culprits, in order of their dissed -appearance: 1) “all levels of government,” 2) “the federal government,” and 3) our what-me-worry President.
Just what does taking responsibility mean coming from a man whose political handlers packaged him in oxymorons (“compassionate conservatism”) and whose anti-Washington campaign rhetoric legitimized him as a Texas governor short on policy ideas and foreign affairs but long-horned in ranch vacations and Saudi-oil connections, a good old boy who could turn government into a turkey farm for his corporate friends.
Sun-tanned and well-vacated, Bush could not repress his knack for nicknames: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job,” he told FEMA head Mike Brown on September 2, a day after Brown, eviscerated on Nightline by Ted Koppel, acknowledged that he had only just learned that thousands of evacuees in the New Orleans Convention Center were without food and water. Brown, a political crony, later rose to the occasion by becoming the first to fall on his sword for 43. Fear not. Help is on the way — Karl Rove, according to The New York Times, is now in charge of the White House “Reconstruction effort” unveiled by the President from an eerily deserted French Quarter. All that was missing was the banner: “Before Me, le Deluge.”
Taking responsibility in any authentic sense should mean acknowledging the first and worst decision: cutting public works projects that would have shored up the levees and prevented Katrina’s worst destruction. An ounce of prevention (roughly the cost of five days in occupied Iraq) would have been worth the cure (the $200 billion price tag for Bush’s reconstruction plan to repair the region – equivalent to the entire cost of the Iraq war and occupation).
It would also obligate Bush to acknowledge his first and worst lie: that no one could have predicted the levees would break. Many did. And recognizing that should force the President to rehire all the principled FEMA and EPA experts who have fled or been fired: those who long ago drew up scenarios showing the consequences of de-funding levee repair, neglecting wetlands and coastal barriers. All those bayou tree-huggers. Add to the list of the ignored, Hugh Kaufman, a toxic waste expert with the EPA for 35 years, who now warns that poisoned waters and toxic sludge will make the city unsafe for a decade, a threat he claims the Bush administration is already covering up and refusing to make public, even as the clean up is being left to low-income, migrant workers.
Taking responsibility might mean finally acknowledging that his former opponent Al Gore, as well as the American Academy of Sciences and virtually every credible international body of peer-reviewed Global Warming experts have been correct; and that pushing the dogma of creationism on public schools is precisely the kind of intrusion of church upon state that Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Franklin and other non-church-going founding fathers of this now disabled democracy, feared.
Meanwhile, Louisiana officials have charged the owners of St. Rita’s Nursing Home with multiple counts of negligent homicide after 34 patients died in their facility in Katrina’s wake. Repeatedly warned by officials to evacuate the patients, the couple in charge of St. Rita’s refused. According to Louisiana’s state Attorney General, Charles Foti, “their inaction resulted in the deaths of these patients.”
Maybe the Senate Judiciary Committee should have asked Judge John Roberts whether Louisiana’s standard of accountability should apply to the President.
Don’t hold your breath, but don’t wait for the next election either. There’s a stench in the wind, and it blows from a ranch in Crawford across the Delta all the way to the very, very White House.
— Carl Nagin