"ndugu" wrote in message
...
To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it
feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were
attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main
qualification
was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all
due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown
for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start
ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of
the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and
liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye
and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse
show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or
catastrophe.


Not much traction with the abuse
September 6, 2005

George W. finally gets it -- in more ways than one. The tardy president
was back on the Gulf Coast yesterday, bucking up the spirits of the
damned and stiffening the resolve of the slackers.
He's getting it as well from his critics, many of whom can't
believe their great good luck, that a hurricane, of all things, finally
gives them the opening they've been waiting for to heap calumny and
scorn on him for something that might get a little traction. Cindy
Sheehan is yesterday's news; she couldn't attract a camera crew this
morning if she stripped down to her step-ins for a march on Prairie
Chapel Ranch.
The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts,
first that the president didn't do what the incompetent mayor of New
Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and
didn't, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city
that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a
"mandatory" evacuation a day late, but kept the city's 2,000 school
buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take
the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in
four feet of dirty water. Then the governor, Kathleen Blanco, resisted
early pleas to declare martial law, and her dithering opened the way for
looters, rapists and killers to make New Orleans an unholy hell. Gov.
Haley Barbour did not hesitate in neighboring Mississippi, and looters,
rapists and killers have not turned the streets of Gulfport and Biloxi
into killing fields.
The drumbeat of partisan ingratitude continues even after the
president flooded the city with National Guardsmen from a dozen states,
paratroopers from Fort Bragg and Marines from the Atlantic and the
Pacific. The flutter and chatter of the helicopters above the ghostly
abandoned city, some of them from as far away as Singapore and averaging
240 missions a day, is eerily reminiscent of the last days of Saigon.
Nevertheless, Sen. Mary Landrieu, who seems to think she's cute when
she's mad, even threatened on national television to punch out the
president -- a felony, by the way, even as a threat. Mayor Nagin, who
you might think would be looking for a place to hide, and Gov. Blanco,
nursing a bigtime snit, can't find the right word of thanks to a nation
pouring out its heart and emptying its pockets. Maybe the senator should
consider punching out the governor, only a misdemeanor.
The race hustlers waited for three days to inflame a tense
situation, but then set to work with their usual dedication. The Revs.
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, our self-appointed twin ambassadors of
ill will, made the scene as soon as they could, taking up the coded cry
that Katrina was the work of white folks, that a shortage of white
looters and snipers made looting and sniping look like black crime, that
calling the refugees "refugees" was an act of linguistic racism. A
"civil rights activist" on Arianna Huffington's celebrity blog even
floated the rumor that the starving folks abandoned in New Orleans had
been forced to eat their dead -- after only four days. New Orleans has a
reputation for its unusual cuisine, but this tale was so tall that
nobody paid it much attention. Neither did anyone tell the tale-bearer
to put a dirty sock in it.
Condi Rice went to the scene to say what everyone can see for
himself, that no one but the race hustlers imagine Americans of any hue
attaching strings to the humanitarian aid pouring into the broken and
bruised cities of the Gulf. Most of the suffering faces in the
flickering television images are black, true enough, and most of the
helping hands are white.
Black and white churches of all denominations across a wide swath
of the South stretching from Texas across Arkansas and Louisiana into
Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia turned their
Sunday schools into kitchens and dormitories. In Memphis, Junior
Leaguers turned out for baby-sitting duty at the city's largest, most
fashionable and nearly all white Baptist church, cradling tiny black
infants in compassionate arms so their mothers could finally sleep. The
owner of a honky-tonk showed up to ask whether the church would "accept
money from a bar." A pastor took $1,400, some of it in quarters, dimes
and nickels, with grateful thanks and a promise to see that it is spent
wisely on the deserving -- most of whom are black.
The first polls, no surprise, show the libels are not working. A
Washington Post-ABC survey found that the president is not seen as the
villain the nutcake left is trying to make him out to be. Americans,
skeptical as ever, are believing their own eyes.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.


I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of
Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and
just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse
show
runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero
experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man
with
little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men
die
in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to
conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for
a
threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to
private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for
politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the
federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA
and
the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the
rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of
thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by
how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off
the
facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind
howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in
America
shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States
fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr.
Bush,
John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full
day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had
cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this
while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his
jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he
flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before
a
trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes
in
a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR
DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael
Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock
of
the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame
those
who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every
bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning,
then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural
disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight
Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where
one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a
coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the
hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and
build
so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be
crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want
to
wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone
long
enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that
fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who
wasn't
up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job.
You
did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it.
Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this
has
to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.