The REAL Core of Bush Loyalty: A Paper Tiger

Gakked from Daily Kos, a poll from AP/Ipsos:

Overall, do you approve, disapprove or have mixed feelings about the way George W. Bush is handling his job as President?

Strongly Approve 20 (23)
Somewhat Approve 11 (10)
Lean Toward Approval 8 (9)
Lean Toward Disapproval 14 (13)
Somewhat Disapprove 5 (5)
Strongly Disapprove 40 (38)

Total

Approve 39 (42)
Disapprove 59 (55)

Italics theirs. Bold emphasis mine (and other boldface removed). Numbers in parentheses are from the previous poll.

Bush has dropped below 40%. He's officially tanking. The "popular wartime Preznit" BS is long since dead. (Of course, that's what you get for invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor -- I mean, Iraq after 9/11.)

More importantly, however, the strong approval rating is a mere 20%. Just half of the strong disapproval. That, my friends, is the solid, unshakeable core of the willingly deluded who continue to believe Bush anointed by God. That's it. And you can get 20% of Americans to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Hey, Democrats. You can call out the Bush Cultists for being lying, corrupt traitors. Honest. It's safe now.
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(/) Roland X
O.D. (Original Deaniac)

Now IS the Time; Now HAS To Be the Time

So the adults are in charge, huh?

With everything from death to thuggery to sexual harrassment taking place at the hands of the government, give me one good reason not to play the "blame game."

I don't give a damn if Democrats go down too, if they're partly responsible for the horror that is Lake New Orleans. Now, Governor Blanco has unquestionably been slimed in an outright lie by the administration, which claimed she did not declare a state of emergency when it is a matter of record that she did on the 26th. However, criminal negligence is criminal negligence, and one slander does not an innocent make, so I reserve judgement.

Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that Bush, the DHS and FEMA failed miserably. While Bush let them eat cake and fiddled, New Orleans drowned and the entire Gulf Coast was swamped.

As the entire sane blogosphere is pointing out, no one is responsible for an act of nature. They are responsible for their preparations for it (and lack thereof), criminal negligence during, and obscene neglect bordering on manslaughter afterwards. Thousands are dead because of these soulless fools. The buck stops now, or the next time will only be worse.

(/) Roland X
Bin Laden must be laughing his evil @$$ off...

9/11 Really DID Change Everything

Just not the way we thought:

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

...

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

...

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."

...

"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found that the United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural hazards vs. $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said, "FEMA has been marginalized. . . . There is one focus and the focus is on terrorism."

...

Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent."

Emphasis mine in all cases.

The Washington Post has been absolutely amazing about this story. I highly recommend the entire article.

Kevin Drum, who (after a brief hiccup) has been the voice of moderates' outrage over this fiasco, has this to say about the article:

Here's the part I don't get — and I mean I genuinely don't get it, regardless of who's at fault here. Everyone suggests that part of the problem is that FEMA's focus was redirected toward terrorism after 9/11. In and of itself, this is neither surprising nor wrong. But the requirements to respond to a major terrorist attack on a U.S. city are largely identical to the requirements for responding to a hurricane like Katrina: food, medicine, maintenance of order, evacuation, and temporary shelter. So what are FEMA's plans for responding to, say, a large scale chemical weapon attack on Chicago? They'd have less warning than they did with Katrina and the requirements for aid would be largely similar. What would they do?

Exactly what they have done, Kevin -- spin for all they're worth, abandon the "poor, huddled masses" to whatever fate befell them, and send Halliburton in to profit off of the misery. (Oh, and Brown's predecessor as head of FEMA is now a lobbyist for Kellogg, Brown and Root. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.) With the obvious difference of being able to start wars over it instead of having to beg off on the whole "act of God" thing.

I understand the impulse to avoid "partisanship" during this terrible time, I really do. But with the Cheney administration desperately trying to pawn off responsibility for this fiasco on the Governor and Mayor (with outright lies in some cases), and with the clear and present dereliction of duty on the parts of the responsible parties (the DHS director and the head of FEMA in particular), we need to keep shouting this from the rooftops until the American people finally hear us -- because something has to be done about them before the next disaster.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix...
but before the phoenix can rise, first it must burn.

So Where's The Foreign Money?

Right here:

By Friday, offers had been received from Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, Georgia, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates.

My faith in America is shaken. Humanity in general, OTOH...after everything this country has done, especially considering these are red states...this is really heartening.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix

Because I Have To

...I'm still in shock over New Orleans.

I was born in New York. 9/11 is still the only day I have ever just not gone to work -- called in sick, sure, but I just couldn't move from my television, watching my beloved city scream in agony as a monster stabbed a poisoned blade through its heart.

This is worse.

The unimaginable, breathtaking corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration throughout all this has made me purely ill, but right now even their responsibility for FEMA's sorry state pales to near-insignificance in the face of the massive death, destruction and suffering in the city. Babies dying of dehydration. Bodies floating in the streets. Thousands of people trapped, stranded, with no food or water because no one can get their heads out of their butts long enough to help them.

Politically, this is the right response:

No whitewashes. Find out who fucked up. Republicans, Democrats, I don't care. Anyone who screwed up should be tarred and feathered.

Yes. Absolutely. We need to find out what went wrong and make sure it never happens again.

LATER.

(Though yes, there is a place for keeping the heat on the blood-sucking monsters who drained the defenses from the Big Easy to play God and pork with.)

Right now, however, anyone who can do something needs to do it. I don't care whether you're red, blue, purple or rutting chartreuse. Right now, you help and you're on the side of the angels as far as I'm concerned. The rest of us need to give whatever we can. While we're in sufficiently dire straits monetarily that we can't match the full Skippy challenge, we are donating what we can through my office, which has a matching fund. Best Buy has one as well, but given the rapidly increasing outpouring of donations, I suspect they'll hit their million dollar cap soon, whereas my office has not listed a donation cap of their own.

I'd ask everyone reading this to do what they can, but I'm certain that all of you already are.

That's what's really tearing me up, ironically enough. Emotionally, I don't know which way to jump. There is so much that is wrong and ugly about this horror. The government knew this disaster was coming. We knew. And the sheer callousness of so many...yeah, I expected a few epic cases of jerkus maximus, but the pure, unadulterated bile aimed at people too poor to get out and who had to salvage what they could to survive...there are no words. I won't call it stealing or looting when the city is all but destroyed, and what was taken was solely for survival; call it "salvage rights" and be done with it, considering that most of what was taken out of need would have been destroyed anyway. But some people have to blame anyone and everyone but their Dear Leaders, even if that means pointing the finger at dying infants and senile grandparents.

On the other hand...so much giving. So much caring. So much not caring who's in need, or how much, just seeing the need and filling it. It's a feeling I thought we lost when Mr. Uniter took a sword to this country and cleaved it in two. And maybe...just maybe...people are actually waking up to how badly our system is messed up. It's horrific that we had to lose an entire major American city for this to happen...and that even then, it might not be enough. But when Fox correspondents tell Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity to get a gorram clue, maybe there's hope after all. "The best of times, the worst of times" indeed.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix