What are the US doing????

Just read this on www.michaelmoore.com:

Friday, September 2nd, 2005


Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
[email protected]
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

Kind of highlights the lack of act together!!

 

y just goes to show for all the USA attitude, look at our Money, power, Oil, Millitary might, etc, they still couldn't organise a piss up in the brewery. I'm surprised they could fight a war to be honest. (ar ya they needed our help to do that, probably the organising it!).

 

It's the American way.

The idea that the Government could have ordered the evacuation of N.Orleans, and laid on busses and trucks for people who didn't have cars and guns of their own! That's just Commie talk ..

Hey, its not like there were Holywood films about disasters to have learnt from.

 

Hay Ditton, you used the words Amerian and Learn in the same post, it just isn't their way, they like to make the same mistakes over and over again.
Oh ya just look how wonderful America is, just look how they look after their own people. The land of the free they say a, where anyone can loot and rape as much as they like cos the government don't give a $h1t.

 

If there's any voice of sanity and reason on this forum when it comes to politics it's certainly not evident from the unpleasant nonsense posted on this thread.

Quotes from Michael Moore, eh? Well that must be right then.

Does it matter at all to anyone here that it was Bush himself who appealed to the State and City of New Orleans to evacuate and they eventually started moving only after he called. How many thousands more lives would have been lost if he had left things up to the mayor of New Orleans?

On the other hand, it wasn't Bush but President Clinton and the State itself that cut the levee funding - not that it would have made a great deal of difference as the flooding started at the strongest part of the levee not the weakest part (which would have been the part strengthened).

Let's remind ourselves that in the recent Tsunami disaster the US had delivered the first load of aid and provisions before Britain and the UN had managed to get it together to arrange the date of the first meeting at which they would make arrangements. This disaster affected an area the size of Britain. Had it been Britain we would have done so much better wouldn't we?

Those who are happy to snigger at how the US 'couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery' and make weighty intellectual comments like '(the US is) where anyone can loot and rape as much as they like cos the government don't give a $h1t', please continue to do so. Please God, may such a disaster never happen anywhere near your own homes.

On the other hand, those that would like to get a handle on the truth of the situation might start by delving into the following:

The Katrina response: a different view (from Harry's Place)

Where was Katrina going to hit?

Who cut the funding?

It's not really surprising that many forum members are so ill-informed. As is so often the case the BBC has been shamelessly plugging it's own anti-Bush, anti-American agenda:

What, the BBC biased ???!!

What is disappointing, is the gleeful rush of some Zero Gain members to score their own cheap points.

 

Thank you for the voice of reason 7_V. The 'news' (not just on the bbc) these days seems to prefer to speculate and opinionate rather than report the facts.

 

Why would you assume that a few amateur right-wing web-blogs were a more accurate source of news than the BBC? I know which I'd prefer to believe!

Tony.

PS Even Fox News was criticising Bush yesterday!

 

Some of the scenes I saw on TV yesterday would shame 3rd world countries IMO. I simply cannot understand how so little has been done in a week by the richest nation on the planet.

 

7_V/hifikrazy, I'm not going to take what you say as authoritative but I do accept the thrust of your argument.

This is a very significant event about which we know [only part], and I for one allowed myself to comment on the basis of the evidence I was able to see.

I certainly agree that this should not be the focus for short-term political argument - it goes much deeper than that.

 

I didnt say i beleived them. You only have to listen to/watch the BBC to realise they are increasingly prone to speculation and opining rather than fact, and its been going that way for quite some time. I dont think the response has been as bad (yes it could have been better, but not by as much as the 'news' /popular opinion seems to want us to believe) as most people seem to assume it has been.

Unfortunately people have a tendency to believe what they are told. When in actual fact all we can really take as cold hard fact from any given bit of reporting is the basics: ie there is an enormous disaster in the gulf coast region of the united states and many people have died.
Same applies to any other reporting. Anyway, i prefer not to get in to an argument. I only hope that relief/rescue finds those who need it as quickly as possible.

 

Frankly, the US administration's lack of action speaks far more eloquently than the usual selection of tired neo-con blog-wank ever will. The truth isn't being hidden, it's there in those images, and in the shit and the blood that cover the streets of New Orleans.

 

The contributors to Harry's Place are left-wing (they call themselves Marxists).

The 'Who Cut the Funding' link is indeed a link to information posted on a right-wing site. However, the account of the action taken during the Clinton administration is in the public record.

I'm glad to have opened this thread up a bit. We all have different views and politics (and thank goodness for that) but surely the situation is deserving of a discussion that's above the level we'd find in a primary school playground.

Tony, your political views are hardly a closely guarded secret. I should think that everyone knows which you'd 'prefer to believe'. We shouldn't, however, allow our personal preferences to obscure the truth - in so far as the truth can be ascertained (which is never easy).

 

Steve, forget Tony's (and mine) leftist political views just long enough to consider the TV scenes yesterday on non-BBC channels. Were they all biased? IMO the US administration has simply been incompetent/biased/stupid (delete as you see fit).

 

When I see live footage of a whole community drowning / starving / stranded in a sea of shit with no help anywhere to be seen I know I can safely ignore any right-wing NeoCon apologists who claim the situation is either under control or someone else's fault! Sorry Steve, but trying to defend Bush on this one makes you look more than a little foolish.

Tony.

 

Dev, I certainly accept that the response of the US government has been inadequate and, to a fair extent, incompetent.

However, I find the gloating, anti-US attitude that was exhibited earlier in this thread particularly distasteful.

FWIW, my own view is that any inadequacy and incompetence of the US government's response is not due to the inherent 'evilness' of Bush but rather because bureacracies in general are pretty useless at dealing with this sort of crisis. I strongly suspect that the response of most other governments around the world, including our own, would have been equally bad and most likely worse.

As far as the left wing/right wing issue goes, it's sad that a tragedy of this nature should be viewed so predominently through political filters of any hue.

Dev, some of my best friends are lefties.

 

This was the NYTimes story the blog link was complaining about:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03sat1.html?pagewanted=print

There are some fundamentals of American socio-polictical and economic life that underscore this tradegy. This includes rich/poor and black/white divisions, whereby responses to disasters (ironically, a staple for the Holywood blockbusters) expose contradictions in federal/state and collectivist/individualist action.

This is human tragedy, and on a large-scale, so we must feel and act for others in distress. But the USA is a powerful global force, with strong ideology about how the world should order itself.

 

It's not a tragedy of nature, it is a man-made disaster. One that was forecast with great accuracy here (with thanks to ErikL on PFM for the link). This was written two years ago.
And here is what the mayor of New Orleans thinks.
Dubya & co were out-to-lunch when this hit, even that arch-commie Newt Gingrich thinks the White House has been more than a tad dozy.

 

Actually Joel, I didn't say this was a 'tragedy of nature'. I said "it's sad that a tragedy of this nature should be viewed...blah, blah..."

 

So you did, Steve.
How long do think we should wait before putting the boot in... a week, 16 days?