And shame, SHAME on the toadies at NBC – including that self-righteous apologist prig, Matt Lauer – for cutting off Kanye’s emotional, anti-Bush speech during last night’s “Concert for Hurricane Relief”.
As usual, the major networks are obsessed with portraying Bush as the Great White Father. Since rousing himself from his month-long vacation to foray in comfort along the Gulf Coast, Bush has received hours of sympathetic, flattering and undeserved air time for his vacuous “hang on” comments – and from networks other than Fox.
For the past 24 hours, the networks have been broadcasting an alternate reality in which 1/3 of the National Guard units, along with their high water vehicles, aren’t in Iraq; half the Army Corps of Engineers budget for maintenance of the levees and pumping stations hadn’t been slashed to pay for Iraq; and FEMA hasn’t been gutted in favor of what the whole world now knows is a totally useless Department of Homeland Security.
Speaking of FEMA, hasn’t its current director, Michael D. Brown, down a bang-up job of post-hurricane spin, putting together an impressive press conference while covering up – gee, what a concept for a Bush man – for FEMA’s ineffectiveness?
Brown’s knowledge of disaster management is about the same as the average five year old’s. Before being handed the leadership of FEMA, Brown was an estate planning lawyer in Colorado, and counsel for the International Arabian Horse Association.
An aside: compare FEMA’s torporous response to heavily Democratic New Orleans in 2005 to its lightning-fast hurricane relief efforts in pre-election Florida, which helped win the state for Bush.
Another aside: Louisiana’s Treasurer has started conversations with Wall Street moguls about issuing municipal bonds to rebuild New Orleans.
Louisiana’s bond ratings were already downgraded, pre-Katrina, so one wonders, except for the promised influx of Federal disaster funds, how New Orleans or Louisiana would come up with the cash to repay the bonds now.
One wonders, except that we live in Bush land rather than reality. The real question, as one of my friends put it, is when some subsidiary of Halliburton will be awarded the contract for rebuilding New Orleans.