Bush’s Final Presser: Redefining Success, One Rooftop Rescue at a Time

Still-President George W. Bush, looking on Monday morning like most of America now feels, stood before the White House press corps one last time to express his undying gratitude for their piss-poor performance during his eight-years in office. From groggy start to rambling finish, it was a jaw-dropping performance.

In keeping with a long-standing pattern, Bush repeatedly “admitted” that his “rhetoric” might not have been right (“Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.”). All the deeds were fine; he just didn’t sell them well. For the Boy King, this has always been the PR presidency; he is now just more loose-lipped about it. Like with so many crappy, Peter-Principled CEO types, he has made the strategy the tactic.

In that vain vein, the most startling moment to my ear and eye was Bush’s perception of his failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina with anything resembling appropriate gravity:

Don't tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed.

You know, I remember going to see those helicopter drivers, Coast Guard drivers, to thank them. . .

Wait, hang on—I just have to interrupt for minute: “Helicopter drivers?” “Coast Guard Drivers?”

I think we call them “pilots.”

OK, carry on. . . .

You know, I remember going to see those helicopter drivers, Coast Guard drivers, to thank them for their courageous efforts to rescue people off roofs -- 30,000 people were pulled off roofs right after the storm moved through. That's a pretty quick response.

Could things have been done better? Absolutely. Absolutely.

But when I hear people say the federal response was slow, then what are they going to say to those chopper drivers or the 30,000 that got pulled off the roofs?

Amazing, right? It doesn’t even occur to Bush that having to pull people off of roofs is wholly emblematic of the slow response. Last time I checked, the standard advice when faced with a big hurricane is not “First, get on your roof.”

As for the levees breaking, the floods, well, “no one could have anticipated. . .” except, well, um:

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.

A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House's "situation room," the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.

The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina's size would "likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching" and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. . . .

In a second document. . . a computer slide presentation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared for a 9 a.m. meeting on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina made landfall, compared Katrina's likely impact to that of "Hurricane Pam," a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.

The hurricane's Category 4 storm surge "could greatly overtop levees and protective systems" and destroy nearly 90 percent of city structures, the FEMA report said. It further predicted "incredible search and rescue needs (60,000-plus)" and the displacement of more than a million residents.

So, that’s four days notice—or six days before those helicopter drivers got to work—but the “Hurricane Pam” simulation, that was done a full year before Katrina.

But why stop there? Bush was actually warned about the problem with the New Orleans levees over four years before Katrina; his response:

Funding for flood prevention was slashed by 80 per cent, work on strengthening levees to protect the city was stopped for the first time in 37 years, and planning for housing stranded citizens and evacuating refugees from the Superdome were crippled. Yet the administration had been warned repeatedly of the dangers by its own officials.

In early 2001, at the start of Mr Bush's presidency, his Government's Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) warned that a hurricane hitting New Orleans would be the deadliest of the three most likely catastrophes facing America; the others were a massive San Francisco earthquake and, prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York.

So, I guess, in a manner of speaking, his “response” wasn’t slow at all—Bush laid the groundwork for those wonderful rooftop photo-ops four years in advance.

This sort of truth-squading could be done with just about every response Bush gave in his presser. And it should be done, not just today, but for every instance of Bush legacy burnishing we will be forced to endure, push back on, fight, and re-fight for many years to come. Though it might be rare to see the burnishing this unvarnished, it has been made apparent from these instant re-writes on current events, through the neocons’ Vietnam revisionism, to the recent attempts to trash-talk the New Deal that nothing is safe or sacred.

Certainly not the truth.

. . . .

On a related point, nothing exemplifies just what a petty, egomaniacal, vindictive jerk this president was, is, and will always be than his treatment Helen Thomas. Bush had stopped calling on Thomas long ago, the White House press office even tried to take away her front row seat—a “punishment” for asking tough questions—but to not give her the honor of the first or last question at his final presser was, to my mind, classless.


cross-posted on Firedoglake

A Bridge to Somewhere

Anybody else see the irony in the President’s instant declarations of support for the communities affected by the collapse of the I-35 bridge? That was my question going into this post, and much to my surprise, the answer from the establishment media was a pretty resounding “yes.”

This was the headline and lead graph run by the AP on Tuesday:

Bush's promises familiar to still-broken New Orleans

New Orleans - For New Orleans residents, the scene was all too familiar: President Bush, touring the site of the collapsed Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, promising to cut red tape and rebuild quickly.

And, believe it or not, a quick search of Google news turns up dozens of similar headlines.

Of course, a news story doesn’t butter the biscuit. Two years and umpteen news stories later, New Orleans is still a battered shell of its former self, cowering behind improperly repaired levees. Much of what Bush promised the night he stood in Jackson Square was never delivered, or, at least was never delivered to the people that needed the help. Plenty of Republican campaign contributors got to rent the government cruise ships at inflated prices or staff debris removal teams with underpaid undocumented workers at a hefty mark up.

What did get delivered to New Orleans, of course, were thousands of formaldehyde-filled “temporary” trailers—or, as I like to call them, Katrina Kancer Kabins—and it was the “ironic” news that FEMA was going to stop selling and donating those trailers that actually initially set me a-googling.

You see, these trailers were known to be rolling gas chambers eons ago—and yet this quiet catastrophe, this insult to injury, was allowed to play out in slow motion while the poor, displaced, and (dare I mention) predominantly African American inhabitants of these trailers continued to breathe toxic fumes morning, noon, and night. FEMA dragged its feet on testing, and then suppressed the results for close to a year, before finally responding to Congressional pressure on the very same day that the 35W bridge collapsed. But, of course, responding to pressure and stopping the future sales of these trailers doesn’t get any of the current inhabitants of these triple-K’s into safe and permanent housing any faster.

When compared to the billions spent for Katrina relief, the $250 million quickly approved for Minneapolis bridge repair by a vacation-hungry Congress seems like a mere pittance. But, it should be pointed out that the bridge money is two-and-a-half times the legal limit set by Congress for these kinds of emergency relief expenditures.

In fact, some members of Congress think we just got hosed. At $250 million, the third-of-a-mile span will cost about $130,000 per foot—quite high for this type of bridge. Some might think, “Well at lest this one is a bridge to somewhere.” But, one should remember that the old bridge should have been maintained by a state gas tax that Minnesota’s Republican Governor vetoed last spring. And, considering all of the national obligations we can’t seem to meet these days, the quick infusion of federal money still has to raise some questions.

Questions like: Why the big number? Why the rush? Couldn’t Congress have allocated the first $100 million now with a promise to supply the rest after Minnesota officials solicited bids and presented real plans for new bridge?

And how much you wanna bet that this bridge gets built by next summer?

Would the answer to these questions have anything to do with the demographic composition of the Twin Cities, or, more specifically, the demographic makeup of the commuters who regularly drove that length of I-35? Or, might this have something to do with where the Republicans are planning to hold their 2008 national convention?

I’m just asking.

Meanwhile, the victims of a 2005 hurricane wait for more than answers. They are waiting to get their homes—and their city—back.

Now, I am not necessarily saying that Minneapolis doesn’t need its bridge back, but when I think about all of those people in all of those trailers, I wonder what our nation’s priorities are, and where our allegiances lie.

Which sort of brings us back to Bush, his promises at the banks of the Mississippi last weekend, and the lies he told folks down river back in 2005.

As detailed in the AP story I cite above, Bush’s promises to rebuild New Orleans were all one Melanie Thompson needed to move her family of five back to her old neighborhood and begin repair work on her flooded home. Two years later, the Thompson family still lives in their tiny, toxic FEMA trailer, still waiting for the aid they need to rebuild.

It seems silly to even compare drivers inconvenienced by a missing bridge with a family like the Thompson’s, and yet, I still have this sense that come September 2008, those drivers have a better chance of crossing the Mississippi via 35W than the Thompson’s have of crossing their own home’s threshold.

I suppose it is possible that President Bush meant well back in 2005 when he promised to stay focused on New Orleans “as long as it takes,” and other problems just got in the way. I suppose. Maybe some similar problems will slow Minneapolis bridge reconstruction to a crawl. Maybe. But I still have a nasty feeling that the Twin Cities get their bridge back before the Thompson’s get a formaldehyde-free permanent home. History can argue about whether that was this administration’s actual intent.

Of course, they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m not sure about the intentions part, but I’m pretty certain about the destination.


(cross-posted on Daily Kos)