Left In Lowell

Here’s a great diary bringing together links and quotes from various sources detailing Bush’s administration and their criminal negligence in dealing with the threats to New Orleans, the destruction of which many people have known for years was only a matter of time. Quotes from the diary include:

[In early 2001] the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.
…
For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.
…
The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Here’s a comparison of the Democratic and Republican online responses to this disaster (I’ve already had emails from Dean, Obama, urging people to donate).

Here’s what Bush did while people died in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf, yesterday. He then went back to his ranch for the night, you know, instead of flying his ass out to the area on the redeye like any other president would have, including his own damn father.

Here are the facts, folks.

40% of Louisiana’s National Guard, the very people trained and equipped for these sorts of disasters, are getting shot at in Iraq instead of saving their loved ones at home. Their equipment is with them.

Bush’s thrice-bedamned tax cuts and his adventure in Iraq are directly to blame for the stoppage of work on the very levees that broke. We don’t know if finishing them would have prevented the loss of New Orleans, but I guess we’ll never know now.

The president took an extra 4 days to figure out that he should maybe come back to work and put his leadership into it. We knew this storm was bad by Saturday night and Sunday.

Bush and his party has refused to fund improvements to the aging Coast Guard fleet, the people who are the front lines in homeland security on our coasts, and some of the first to repond to to this sort of disaster.

There are rumblings that the Federal response has been less than stellar. I guess that’s to be expected, since FEMA and other agencies have been gutted by the budget woes of this president.

I don’t like the idea of being accused of politicizing this tragedy; and I know there will be some who will say I am. But these questions need to be asked. No one else is doing it. I am not the one politicizing anything: this president already did that, when he put politics and his race to be a war preznit over the safety of every man, woman, and child in New Orleans. When he still puts us all in danger with his failed policies.

Do you want to trust your family with his underfunded and politically-lead federal agencies?