Dan Froomkin on George W. Bush in Action

Remind me: Why did anybody, anywhere, anytime think that George W. Bush would be a good president?

Dan Froomkin writes:

A Dearth of Answers: Diane Sawyer's rare live interview with President Bush this morning on ABC's Good Morning America exposed one of the president's greatest weaknesses: He doesn't have the answers to some of the most important questions. The White House press corps is sort of used to that by now, but the American public... may be less sympathetic. Bush smiled... but much of what he said was not directly responsive to what Sawyer asked....

Sawyer: "Mr. President, this morning, as we speak . . . there are people with signs saying 'Help, come get me'. People still in the attic, waving. Nurses are phoning in saying the situation in hospitals is getting ever more dire and the nurses are getting sick because of no clean water. Some of the things they asked our correspondents to ask you is: They expected -- they say to us -- that the day after this hurricane that there would be a massive and visible armada of federal support. There would be boats coming in. There would be food. There would be water. It would be there within hours. They wondered: What's taking so long?"

Bush: "Well, there's a lot of food on its way. A lot of water on the way. And there's a lot of boats and choppers headed that way. Boats and choppers headed that way. It just takes a while to float 'em! . . . "

Sawyer: "But given the fact that everyone anticipated a hurricane five, a possible hurricane five hitting shore, are you satisfied with the pace at which this is arriving? And which it was planned to arrive?"

Bush: "Well, I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday. I mean, I understand the anxiety of people on the ground. I can imagine -- I just can't imagine what it is like to be waving a sign saying 'come and get me now'. So there is frustration. But I want people to know there is a lot of help coming. I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will."...

Sawyer: "The prospect, some people are saying, [is] of a million American refugees in place for a very long time. . . . What are you saying to them about how far the federal government will go to get their lives back? Do you promise jobs? Do you promise that they will be moved back into housing and how soon?"

Bush: "Well, first of all, we've got to get a handle on the situation. In other words, we have to stop the flooding in New Orleans and, you know, rescue the folks. Get them out of harm's way. Get food and medicine to people. Then take a serious assessment about what it is going to need to rebuild New Orleans. And parts of Mississippi."...

About Those Levee "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," Bush said. Wrong. Just for starters, how about Sunday's New Orleans Times-Picayune... Monday's New York Times.... [A]s Andrew C. Revkin and Christopher Drew write in today's New York Times: "The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years."...

Comments

[Samuel Knight]

He lied. Condi lied about not expecting the planes. Chency lied about the reception in Iraq.

He ignored the warnings about 9-11. He ignored the experts on Iraq. And now he ignored the experts in disaster recovery.

I'm furious. I used to work with FEMA - and Bush demolished the Agency. Now people are dying because the team got destroyed.

One of President Clinton's proudest accomplishments destroyed. Will he say something now? Finally, say enough is enough my successor must resign now?

Maybe say: John McCain and John Kerry are honorable men. President Bush and President Cheny have failed the country again. It is time for them to resign and hand the country over to a team of two of the most experienced Senators. John McCain President, John Kerry Vice President. Or maybe Al Gore.

[John Emerson]

McCain used to be honorable. But he's pimping for Bush for years. Kerry and Gore are too feeble and passive. Look elsewhere.

The most pessimistic conclusion, that we're seeing a great nation coming to an end because of a takeover by ignorant, predatory ideologues, is far from out of the question.

With any luck one of the ideologues will show up to deny what I said. Or perhaps a moderate enabler will register their objections.

[Maynard Handley]

Bush: "Well, there's a lot of food on its way. A lot of water on the way. And there's a lot of boats and choppers headed that way. Boats and choppers headed that way. It just takes a while to float 'em! . . . "

There was a Saturday Night Live episode a few months ago that opened with Rumsfeld in Iraq and a soldier asks him "how come there's no armor". Rumsfled waffles for a few seconds then gets an idea. "There really is armor. A whole lot. We've got it all stashed in a warehouse in Kuwait."
The soldier then asks "can we have it" and Rumsfeld starts weaselling "Well, you know, it's kinda heavy and a pain to move".
The soldier says "My unit will come over and move it, we'd be happy to".
Rumsfeld "Well, it's kinda at the back of the warehouse, and there's a lot of stuff in the way".
The soldier "No problem, we'll move everything out the way first, and move it back just the way it was"
Rumsfeld "We...ll, you know, the stuff in the way is delicate. I don't think it's a good idea to have inexperienced personnel mucking around with it. No, I think the best idea is just to leave the armor there at the back of the warehouse".

As Jon Stewart often points out, in the GWB administration truth is sadder than fiction.

[tigger]

Totally reactionary. The entire problem of this whole administration - all reaction, no planning for ANYTHING, except how to get rich off of other's misfortune and suffering. How much of the rebuilding effort dollars will go to Bush's cronies? Why were Bush cronies put in charge of FEMA anyway, with NO disaster experience whatsoever? Disgusting.

[Uncle Jeffy]

Tigger bounced this one perfectly. The Administration's entire efforts for the last five years have consisted of manufacturing phony crises and trying to stomp anyone who opposes them. So now another real crisis explodes, and they again prove themselves incompetent at managing it. Should anyone be surprised?

[matt]

What an utter disgrace and how embarassing to see this idiot represented as the leader of this country. My 9 year old son can weasel his way out of a situation with more finesse than this asshole.

McCain is damaged goods, has been ever since he let Rove and company do him in South Carolina then came crawling to the Bushies offering his integrity to sell their policies. John Kerry? Another member of the Order? That whole sham everyone called an election in 2004 was just proof that within Skull and Bones loyalty to a fellow patriarch trumps loyalty to God and country.

With the exception of John Conyers, Henry Waxman, and Cynthia McKinney there is no one in the Congress who commands even a scintilla of respect, not Reid, not Boxer, certainly not Clinton or Schumer, or Dodd or Lieberman or Biden. The Democratic Party is moribund and anyone who falls for any of their rhetoric is a fool.

The members of congress from Louisiana should be screaming at the top of their lungs about what's going on in New Orleans. The administration should be forced to explain why the warnings it received about the fragile state of the levees was not acted upon in the face of an unprecedented hurricane season with New Orleans identified as a prime area of vulnerability.

The saddest part of all of this is that it's three dollar a gallon gas that's pissing people off here, not the fact that 1800 plus American service members and journalists have died in an illegal war while this smirking arrogant bastard smiles and dissembles on national TV with no one confronting him.

Impeachment is too good for this administration. St. Petersburg would be more appropriate right down to the royal family treatment. Not that I'm advocating any harm to the president of a sovereign nation. I'll leave that to Pat Robertson.

[PaulC]

Is the same lie really so versatile that you can use it again and again?

Bush: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

I guess the only thing a real American anticipates is blue skies, a booming economy, and rose petals thrown by throngs of liberated people.

Bush would do well to look up the name "Walter Maestri" director of the Jefferson Parish Emergency Management Department. I can't actually find him predicting a levee break, but it's easy to find him complaining about levees not being finished in time (New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004) and anticipating a New Orleans looking like a "massive shipwreck".

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&num=10&q=%22walter%20maestri%22%20shipwreck&safe=off&qt_s=Search&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=9&as_maxy=1999&sa=N&tab=gw

Google groups has the nice feature that you can restrict results to a date range and find out what people were saying BEFORE something happened. Of course, you have to cull it from Usenet postings. A "worst case scenario" from 1998:

http://groups.google.com/group/misc.emerg-services/browse_thread/thread/8d7c4bc64c4a9654/19873c4903588da2?lnk=st&q=%22walter+maestri%22&rnum=2&hl=en#19873c4903588da2

"Homes are without electricity or water service. Shelters are stuffed. And
everyone is trapped, whether alone or in clusters, waiting for the National
Guard to bring emergency food rations and supplies of drinking water.
Assuming no levee breaks, it will be three to five days before city pumps
have made much headway sluicing the inundation back into the lake, marshes
and river that encircle the metro region "

It is odd that this is called a "worst case" scenario in the article, since the same text adds what could make it worst--a levee break. Does this count as anticipating a levee break? It certainly doesn't sound like this was ruled out entirely, and it sounds almost as bad as what really happened.

The need for fast emergency aid to New Orleans in event of a hurricane is about as "unanticipated" as the need for the Bush administration to tell lies about whether they were reasonably prepared for the situation.

As for Maestri:

"The example of emergency personnel -- the folks who know hurricanes best --
should wake up anyone tempted to take a laissez-faire approach to
preparedness. Walter Maestri, director of the Jefferson Parish Emergency
Management Department, will pack his wife and sons off to Jackson three days
before any Gulf hurricane could possibly hit New Orleans. His job will keep
Maestri here, as will Jim Hubbard's as chief executive officer for the
American Red Cross in Louisiana. But like Maestri, Hubbard won't subject his
family to the same risk. Seventy-two hours ahead of a possible New Orleans
landfall, Hubbard's wife and their Pekinese, Pepper, have made plans to be
in a car or plane headed for Dallas to stay with relatives."

[John McKinzey]

Just pitiful... But this is pretty much par for the course for pretty much any endevour Bush has ever launched... Too bad his Daddy's friends can't bail that water.

[wcw]

Polite people should make it a habit whenever
they use the word "Republican" to pair it with
words like "incompetent" or "mendacious" until
the noun becomes as poisoned as "liberal".

The rest of us simply mutter dark things about
asshat loser kleptocrats.

[Frank Emesis]

has the mayor of New Orleans given any reaction to this interview. His head must have exploded.

[Danthelawyer]

Look, these people hate government -- they're like libertarians, only worse, b/c they think government should occasionally intervene to keep people from making love to each other.

So why is anyone surprised they do don't make competent bureaucrats?

[Nels Nelson]

I posted the following on hybridcars.com on August 2 in response to a discussion on $540,000,000 allocated to Louisiana "coastal restoration" in the recently passed energy bill:

Technically, Louisiana never had a coastline in the sense of say, California. The coast of Louisiana is made up of marshes and barrier islands called "chenieres", which were created by sediments deposited by the Mississippi River and held in place by vegitation. This is what has protected New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico and the storms which blow in from there. The vegitation is dying and the chenieres are disappearing due to the activities mentioned in the previous post. The only thing now protecting New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico are sheet pile, levees, huge pumping stations and the Army Corps of Engineers. These measures incur substantial costs. But those costs are insignificant compared to the projected losses incurred by a major storm. Imagine the French Quarter under 10 feet of water and tens of thousands of lives lost. The future benefits will indeed exceed $540,000,000. The problem is that it is not enough to replace what has been lost.

What can I say?

[pat]

Bush: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

The following transcript is dated Sept 20, 2002.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_neworleans.html

Really, impeaching this guy is not enough.

[piotr]

"Nobody anticipated using passager planes as bombs" is a statement with a little modicum of plausibility -- that the speaker indeed never heard about it.

"Nobody anticipated levee breach" is at par with "So you do have Blacks in Brasil?" Even a person of very limited interests should heard something about it.

[sm]

Rememeber when Americans were famous for doing things better than other people?

It seems such a long time ago now.

[BroD]

Andrew Jackson won New Orleans.
George W. Bush lost it.

[monkyboy]

Where are Kerry, Reid, Leiberman, etc.?

They could have gone to NO and offered to pitch in. If senators can go to foreign countries on fact-finding missions, why not a U.S. disaster area? Imagine a shot of them waving up as Air Force One flew over...

Bush is bad, but the Demos are just as incompetent

[ricardo]

Guys...I just posted this over at thecarpetbaggerreport.com

"I've been puzzling as to how the Bush spin machine will remotely attempt to get some traction on the issue of the Army Corps of Engineers' cutbacks in New Orleans levee maintenance…typically, they need to blame some lower level staffers within government (aka the Abu Ghraib courtmartials/trials) or to launch an investigation that leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with yet another coat of whitewash…seems to me the problem in New Orleans is so great that at least the head of a cabinet secretary would be offered to Bush's critics…but that would be Rumsfeld, right???…isn't he the ultimate boss of the Corps???

Would Rumsfeld go gently into that good night??? After hanging tough over Abu Ghraib, now he is to resign - shamed for all history - for the tragedy in NOLA? I would think he'd choose to fight this - it would be galling for him to resign simply to salvage the younger Bush's ass. Ultimately, of course, it's not his choice…after all, only Cheney has the power to hire and fire…lol."

[ricardo]

And posted this at carpetbagger, too:

"I've also been wondering why it is that Fedex can get their planes anywhere in the world overnight, but we couldn't get the Department of Defense to similarly get C-5A's cargo planes to Houston and begin immediately launching relief/rescue operations…I assume they're mostly in Iraq, and if Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld bring them back it's a tacit admission that domestic security has been compromised all along."

[J Thomas]

"Bush is bad, but the Demos are just as incompetent"

Monkyboy, you could be right. However, Bush has been given ample opportunity to prove it, and they have not.

It's time to give the democrats their chancew to mess up. Put in a democrat as president and give him 6 years with a majority of democrats in both houses. Then come back and we'll discuss it.

[monkyboy]

The Demos aren't going to be running squat if they keep sitting on their asses and letting Karl Rove shape the news.

Imagine Harry Reid, ankle deep in water outside the Superdome, saying, "we have trusted and followed President Bush on major decisions in the past, this time we are here for ourselves to find out the truth..." Meanwhile, Bush is in San Diego playing the guitar.

Bush is on the ropes here, the Demos shouldn't help him up, they should go for the knockout. The minimum wage in Congress is over $160,000/year, time for them to earn it.

[J Thomas]

Monkyboy, if the democrats won't do it, will anybody else?

Libertarians? Greens? Anybody?

I've been supporting democrats because they looked like the only alternative, but it looks more and more like it's time to create an alternative.

If I wanted to avoid NYSE I doubt I'd go with AMEX as the alternative. Democrats have to be more than second-string republicans to get my support.

[monkyboy]

I agree, J. It took 4 years under Bush to get me to cast my first vote for a Democrat in twenty-five years. After 7 months of being a Democrat, I'm ready to look for a third party to join.

This hurricane and its aftermath have brought into the open everything the Republicans are doing wrong, yet I haven't seen a single Demo on the news yet, just the talking heads of FEMA, Homeland Security and Bush himself. Rove has already turned what should be a national debate about Republican corruption and incompetence into a story about looting.

Here's a tip for the hapless Demos:those refugess aren't going home for a long time. Maybe they can be settled in Texas in a manner that counters DeLay's gerrymandering in that state...

[J Thomas]

Monkyboy, if it didn't seem so preposterous I'd almost think that democratic politicians got an ultimatum from the mass media -- don't say anything offensive to republicans or you can't say anything at all.

They simply don't get all that much media exposure, and when they do get a little they're very very polite.

I'd hate to think I'm blaming the victims here. I'd rather think the democratic politicians are just spineless and any day one of them might take the lead.

Of course third party politicians are getting even less media exposure.

So --

"This hurricane and its aftermath have brought into the open everything the Republicans are doing wrong, yet I haven't seen a single Demo on the news yet, just the talking heads of FEMA"

I'd hate to think that there were democrats trying to tell their story and the news simply isn't interested.

[howard]

Why oh Why do we have such a stupid President, and why oh why have all the Presidents in my lifetime been equally stupid.

Illustration of identical Presidential stupidities.

"GHW Bush (41): And they're facing problems that nobody could foresee: breaking of the levees and the whole dome thing over in New Orleans coming apart. People couldn't foresee that."

"CLINTON: Yes, I think that's important to point out. Because when you say that they should have done this, that or the other thing first, you can look at that problem in isolation, and you can say that.

But look at all the other things they had to deal with. I'm telling you, nobody thought this was going to happen like this. But what happened here is they escaped -- New Orleans escaped Katrina. But it brought all the water up the Mississippi River and all in the Pontchartrain, and then when it started running and that levee broke, they had problems they never could have foreseen."

source: yesterday's CNN interview, quoted here: http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005360.php

Why oh why are all of us deLong blog readers so damnably clever and foresighted, while our Presidents -- not just the current one, but the previous two as well -- so incredibly simpleminded. At least we don't have to worry about any of those three idiots returning to the White House. Um, do we?

[Patrick]

Don't you think maybe you should be using this forum to direct people on how they can help in stead of blaming a state issue on the federal government. N.O. has a 1 billion dollar buget and spent zero on the levies. Why don't you wait until the dead are buried. Just demonstrates the lefts complete lack of class. It should show everyone how much trouble this country would be in if anyone with these values gets elected by some miracle.

[dearieme]

"Why did anybody, anywhere, anytime think that George W. Bush would be a good president?" Surely it wasn't necessary that anyone did? All that was required was that enough people thought that he'd be less bad than Gore or Kerry.