Bush Apologists Reach New Level of Inhumanity

Journal Concern's Journal: Bush Apologists Reach New Level of Inhumanity 14

Journal by Concern on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @03:40PM

Ellem posted a David Frum essay the other day - a response to recent criticism of Bush.

I am really looking for anything like an honest defense of Bush on this one. I haven't seen one yet. Not one. What I am seeing are a lot of rapid-fire, ugly, dishonest defenses of him, which makes it look like everyone on the right feels he's guilty but is sticking up for him anyway. But, for me to make a comment like that is exactly the kind of useless, generalizing, straw-man anecdote that this essay starts off with. Except that, in addition to the straw-man fallacy, this essay adds a fresh collection of ugly, dishonest defenses. I'm shocked people are callous enough to associate their names with this, let alone expect anyone to be suckered now.

As neoconservatism runs its course, people will gradually find the writers of essays like these to be worse than what they slyly try to apologize for. Copy-pasting it and leaving the links to citations out of it does it a great service, ellem.

The facts are painfully clear. (NBC news)

New Orleans was well known to be a time bomb, and they weren't given the funds they needed to prepare for big storms. The government clearly had the money; the notorious $200 million Alaskan bridge underscores the point all too well. Would it definitely have saved the city? Some people are desperate to tell you no. They are lying. The truth is simple. We'll never know.

Bush put a fool of a crony with no experience in charge of FEMA, and the agency apparently suffered further under the numerous (and no doubt, expensive) reorganizations that took place under the aegis of his new Department of Homeland Security. Ostensibly it was all meant to better prepare us for terrorism, which we can now see was also a failure. The only difference between a hurricane breaking the levee and a terrorist blowing it up is that, with a hurricane, you always have some warning in advance.

What does this article give us?

A link indicating that one levee break was in a recently upgraded section - a horrifyingly dishonest defense of the people who stopped the levee fortification projects. Obviously maintenance on them continued. But with their funding cut by Bush and the Republicans, they weren't able to do the level of work that they needed. And not just on the levees, but on pumps, on emergency equipment, on planning and preparedness, you name it.
Then it gives us a link discussing relative National Guard troop strength and deployments. My first instinct is to fact check it, from too-long experience with blogs like this, but... Oh my. It's a trick. It doesn't matter if their fact checks or not. Here we all are, watching TV together, watching Fox News reporters crying into the camera and begging for refugees to be allowed to walk out of the city, because there are no troops, no police, no food, and no water, days and days after the disaster... no troops and police, that is, except the ones guarding the bridge, keeping the refugees in.
We already know what happened. And this weasel is using this stupid trick to try to rewrite history. He's writing about troop strength. Look, it's very simple: it doesn't matter what the number was. What these people reported from their own city speaks for itself. The point is not up for debate - because it will be answered with clips from newscasts, and you will finally meet the point where your ability to talk utterly fails to change reality. The evidence is all over the TV. It was a failure of planning, and/or a failure of leadership. You decide which is worse. The fact that redstate.org says 8,000 reservists were available to help them was not a great comfort to the tens of thousands of people that were left alone for six days in the disaster area. It would sound pretty hollow to the people who starved, who dehydrated, who were raped or shot to death. They were begging for help on television. We heard it over and over. "Where are the troops? There are no troops!" If you guys really fall for this memory hole shit, that's what is shocking, and that's what is sickening.
This is what it comes down to. Redstate.org can't say "the troops were there helping, the liberal media just didn't show them." They can't say "They were there, but they couldn't help." They're reduced to saying "well, 8,000 troops were available in theory..."
A link discussing how some police joined in looting. OK... irrelevant.
A link that apparently implies New Orleans owes its fate to the exposure of a Republican congressperson's sexual practices during the Clinton scandal. You see? "You'd better mind your own business with regards to Republican House Speakers' marital infidelity, otherwise... you might find disaster preparedness funding drying up, and only yourself to blame." No, seriously. You just can't make this stuff up.

If this all weren't so miserable, I would actually be laughing. This essay smells more and more, not just of corpses, but of desperation... of strained loyalty and fear, of someone who'se been asked to explain something truly unexplainable, and knows they are failing, but must press on... and of fanatically unquestioning, inexplicable, indeed, unamerican level of loyalty to Bush, that would drive people to grasp at it, repeat it, post it, without knowing (or perhaps even caring?) how awful it is.

Most ridiculous of all, Republicans, as the bodies pile up, still unable to answer the charges against Bush, are inventing charges they can answer.

I am starting to hear people making this a climate change issue. OK, let's be clear, wherever you stand on climate change, it doesn't matter. This is not about climate change. We knew the levees needed work and Bush didn't do it. If terrorists sabotaged a levee, would it take 6 days to respond to people stuck at the convention center?
I'm hearing that the accusations "contradict each other." No one is exactly pointing out what the contradictions are, or worse, like this essay does, their "contradictions" are the series of mistakes that Bush has made. They literally close their eyes, recite the list, and pretend it sounds like they contradict each other, rather than that Bush simply made a series of mistakes. I imagine this theme has room to run; perhaps later they'll find two different liberals who'se ideas actually do conflict, and that will somehow hopefully provide a further lure to the fish.
"Good God, what is wrong with these people? Will they ever learn to see somebody else's misfortune as something more than their political opportunity? This, from the most ruthless exploiters of 9/11 in the country.

This article has the appalling gall to ask, "is there not something indecent about the haste with which the American left avidly tries to turn this terrible disaster to political account?"

This begs the question: What crime cannot be explained away by this foolproof answer? What couldn't Bush do wrong, that wouldn't be OK after all, as long as "the Left's" hastened indecently to prosecute him? If Bush shot a child on national television, would we hear this same universal, generic refrain: "Look, we'll have a study, we'll convene a Congressional investigation... perhaps the facts will come in and we will indeed discover Bush is a child-murderer. But in the meantime, isn't there something indecent about the Left's rush to use this for political gain?"

It is not a problem for people to criticize Bush for fucking up. He and his people fucked up really bad, and there are now thousands of bodies floating in the ruined husk of a major American city. Most of them were not killed by the hurricane. They died afterwards, waiting for help. Some waited in their homes, in buildings, in hospitals... Some went or were taken to places where help should have been... and they died there, after waiting without food and water, wondering why after almost a week of unimaginable horror, the only thing the few visible troops were doing was keeping them trapped in the city. And we had to sit in front of our televisions and watch it.

"Why can't we act first, investigate afterward, and let blame and credit be apportioned as they are due, when they are due?" BECAUSE SIX DAYS AFTER THE DISASTER, THERE WERE PEOPLE DOWN THERE BEGGING FOR THEIR LIVES, DESPERATELY WONDERING WHY THERE WAS NO HELP. As much as I'm sure a professional Bush apologist would love for everyone to, you know, just calm down and not be so angry about it all, we watched on television as people starved and drowned, all while desperately wondering where their help was... for... six... days... straight... We watched while a shockingly idiotic Michael Brown (A Bush crony appointed to head FEMA, despite having no experience to do so) embarrassed himself in television interviews. We watched while stories came back of outrageous confusion and ineptitude... Bush survives because propaganda buys your anger with words. But, as the blubbering Geraldo Rivera and the furious, shell-shocked Shephard Smith showed us last week, there are some things you cannot paper over with words, and some things even professional propagandists cannot be paid to say.

There aren't really strong enough words for being forced to wait in a drowning building without food or water for six days, surrounded by the growing number of floating dead. Not being allowed to leave. Being menaced by the troops meant to protect you, if you dare to try to cross a bridge, or run after them as they drive away, begging them for water. Not when we have a better way. Not when the reason for it is only the callous incompetence of politicians.

If you are calm about this, you are not a human being. And this is exactly what I would call David Frum's ugly, ugly essay, and all those who would repeat it without noticing or being able to tell if any of it is honest. This kind of propaganda, fiddling while Rome is burning, is inhuman.

Ready for more? Here's a quick run through the Ben Stein special:

"George Bush had nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans for New Orleans." A rather audacious lie, considering how widely documented it is that he cut funding for protecting the city.

"George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons, in short make New Orleans into a living hell." Actually, if he had funded preparations, and if he had competent professionals instead of zero-experience, idiot cronies running organized disaster relief, many of these things could have been lessened or prevented.

Perhaps the federal government could save money in future disasters by declaring in advance that since a destroyed city will have some lawless elements, we can therefore refuse to help everyone in the city, since it is all their collective fault.

"George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been" I doubt this, but regardless, I don't think this is about racism either. If anything, it's just about callous indifference to poor people. This is laissez faire capitalism in a nutshell: poor people can't afford a car to escape, and a hotel room or out of town relatives to escape to? They deserve what they get for being poor.

"There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency." Not so. (Dated august 1st.)

"If the energy the news media puts into blaming Bush for an Act of God..." Right... I knew this was coming. I figured the Right would get around to claiming the left was "blaiming the hurricane on Bush." It's the final insult... of their own readers.

"Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed the process by one day." By now we've been led down the garden path to where not taking our medicine won't help us if we're not really sick. Nicely done.

"The entire episode is a dramatic lesson in the breathtaking callousness of government officials at the ground level. And I knew this was coming too. At some point, all outspoken critics of Bush have to be vilified.

Heap it on, Ben Stein. They have nothing to lose now, anyway.

"Why is it that the snipers who shot at emergency rescuers trying to save people in hospitals and shelters are never mentioned except in passing..." Hmm... How about hundreds of mentions an hour across all the major TV networks, for days on end? Don't worry, I'm sure the criticism will intensify if they pretend their shooting was justified.

"What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government" Skipped civics class, apparently.

"If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?" Ah yes... the mandatory evacuation that provided no transportation for those without means to travel. Ah well, if they can't leave on their own power, let 'em drown. We have to weed out the weak, is that it, Ben Stein?

"When the city government simply ignores its own sick and hospitalized and elderly people in its evacuation order, is Mr. Bush to blame for that?" If Malibu was destroyed, I'm sure Mr. Stein would like his federal taxes to cooperate with his state and city taxes in boating him away from the wreckage... instead of bungling for nearly a week while penning him inside it.

"Is there any problem in the world that is not Mr. Bush's fault..." Oh that poor, downtrodden Bush. All these terrible problems aren't his fault. He's just the President. It's not like he takes any responsibility for his budget, or his policy, or his appointments to federal agencies, or... or... He's just misunderstood.

All in all, a stunningly cynical, manipulative, cold-hearted evil collection of words. If you believe in God, you definitely go to hell for things like this.

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