Part of the history that Mr. Bush won’t be reading can be found in a transcript of his speech from Jackson Square on Sept. 15, 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Rather, historians can note the great gulf between the promises made in that speech (examples below) and the inaction that followed. More than fifteen visits to New Orleans and vicinity, which the President repeatedly referred to as “that part of the world,” were not accompanied by a concerted federal effort to rebuild the city and region, its schools and hospitals and housing, its infrastructure, or its storm protection systems whose funding had been repeatedly whittled down by Bush administration budgets before the storm.
president bush
The Destroyer
If a president recites this oath, is he legally bound to take care of the nation itself, or only to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution’ of the United States (however White House legal counsel may interpret that clause)? Does he have some ‘wiggle room’ here? (Does the oath pertain only to duly elected chief executives?)
An Open Letter to President Bush: Don’t Come Back Till WRDA Passes
The following letter has been faxed to the White House (202-456-2461). Please see below for a letter faxed to leaders in the House and Senate urging an override of the president’s veto. (The House has done it! 361 to 54—ninety votes more than needed to override.) Please see our ‘Political Action’ page for fax and phone numbers of the White House and Senate. Help us press for a Congressional override of the president’s veto—it would be a first. We’re halfway there. Thank you.
Horseman of the Apocalypse: “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III . . .”
Yes, we’re interested in that. The president held a press conference this morning, Oct. 17. He said this: . . . we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems...
Ready to Strike Iran?
The Times of London reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a massive three-day strike against 1,200 targets in Iran to “take out” its military capabilities.
Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.
Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus.”
Worlds Apart
We do not know quite how to express the quality of gratitude and belongingness we feel when we hear the President of the United States, once again, on his 16th? visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, refer to our stricken area as “this [or that] part of the world,” as he has done in post-Katrina visits going back at least to early 2006. It would be one thing if he were talking about the tsunami in Indonesia . . . Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief and David Kurtz at TPM Café have both noted this seemingly habitual phrasing, which can only be felt as off-putting. And it can only be interpreted as the speaker’s distancing of himself from responsibility for the area described. (In its patent intent to annoy, the locution is similar to Republicans’ machine-like repetition of “the Democrat party” instead of “the Democratic party.”) For a president who claims to be a Texan through and through, this construction of speech doesn’t sound very neighborly.
“The mission here is not accomplished”: N.O. City Council Member Shelley Midura’s Stern, Bracing Letter to President Bush
Here is an eloquent and hard-hitting letter from New Orleans City Council Member Shelley Midura-first seen on Your Right Hand Thief (thanks, Oyster). Please join us in pressing the White House (202-456-1111; comments@whitehouse.gov) to “second” Midura’s motions.
[Note: Midura is now blogging on DailyKos. She writes: “I hope you can take the time to click on the link to my open letter to President Bush, Press Release and Fact Sheet . . . New Orleans will not allow the discussion of our recovery to be anything but factual and done via the reality based community and not through spin and talking points.”]