Bush Stayed on Vacation

Many on the Right argue that we shouldn't play the "blame game" while Hurricane Katrina survivors still need help. Some have attempted to shift blame for the slow federal relief response away from George Bush. But they cannot avoid one simple fact: while thousands of Americans fought for their lives during the worst natural disaster in this nation's history, GEORGE W. BUSH STAYED ON VACATION.

Bush flew to Arizona to plug his Medicare program and eat cake with Sen. John McCain on the day Katrina made landfall and the levees failed in New Orleans.

Bush flew to California for a celebration of V-J Day the day after Katrina made landfall and the levees failed in New Orleans.

Bush announced he would cut his vacation short by two days, and returned to his home in Crawford, Texas for one more night of vacation.

Bush finally returned to the White House on Wednesday, two days AFTER Katrina made landfall and the levees failed in New Orleans.

To be fair, Vice President Dick Cheney stayed on vacation for six days after Katrina made landfall and the levees failed in New Orleans. And Sec. of State Condi Rice WENT on vacation for three days AFTER Katrina made landfall and the levees failed in New Orleans.

Imagine how the Republicans (and mainstream media) would have reacted if Bill Clinton and Al Gore had behaved similarly. Why is there no outcry from the mainstream media about this?

Recall that Bush has spent more time on vacation as president than any other president in the history of the United States. And he's done that in less than five full years.

Recall also that Bush justified his unprecedented five-week vacation by stating:

I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy.

Katrina struck and we've now seen what "good, crisp decisions", Bush-style, look like. Not very good, not very crisp.

Take for example Bush's claim that no one had anticipated breeching of the levees, even though everyone had anticipated that very breech. Bush is now trying to explain his earlier ignorance.

What I was referring to is this: When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people said, Whew. There was a sense of relaxation. And that's what I was referring to.

And I myself thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people probably over the airwaves say, The bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.

Of course, there were plans in case the levee had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation at a critical moment.

I'm sure all the sheep on the Right will applaud on cue their infallible president's clear explanation. But really, "sense of relaxation?" "Dodged a bullet?" John Aravosis at AmericaBlog has compiled the headlines screaming at us while Bush was feeling a "sense of relaxation." Go read them and see if you can find anything that resembles "we dodged a bullet", or conveys a "sense of relaxation." If you can point it out to me, I'll eat my words.

Oh, and in case you think these are mock-up front pages, you can find them at the Newseum.

Oh, and one more thing. Why is the President of the United States getting his information about the worst natural disaster in our nation's history from people on the airwaves? Doesn't he have tax-dollar-paid staff and advisors to keep him posted on such matters? Is this how Bush gets all of his information, from people over the airwaves?

America can do better than George W. Bush/

More Katrina Horror

The mainstream news media has been doing a pretty good job documenting the ravishes of Hurricane Katrina. Despite FEMA's demand that no images of dead bodies be published or broadcast (since retracted), newspapers and TV networks have been showing some pretty horrible stuff.

Stories of heroics and sorrows have appeared frequently. Now comes a very disturbing story from Australia's Daily Telegraph.

Patients put down
September 12, 2005

DOCTORS working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leave them to die in agony as they evacuated.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

One New Orleans doctor told how she "prayed for God to have mercy on her soul" after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials.

One emergency official, William Forest McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana and the doctors spoke only on condition on anonymity.

How many euthanized people could have been saved if FEMA and Bush had been up to the task of dealing with this natural disaster? And for all the dimwits blowing hot air about how the survivors in New Orleans "deserved" what they got because the didn't evacuate, please explain how a terminal patient was suppose to evacuate the city. Entirely Bush's fault? No. But if he wants to take credit for anything that goes right on his watch, he ought to be held responsible for what goes wrong.

Best. Picture. Ever.

A DailyKos diarist posted this, captured from a TV screen carrying Sky News Ireland. Clearly worth a thousand words.

Republican Shame

Next time you think about voting for a Republican, remember that 11 Republican Congressmen voted against providing victims of Hurricane Katrina with $51 billion in aid. Fortunately, none were from Missouri. But I'm ashamed that one was from my home state of Iowa. The Evil Eleven:

Joe Barton - TX
Jeff Flake - AZ
Virginia Foxx - NC
Scott Garrett - NJ
John Hostettler - IN
Steve King - IA
Butch Otter - ID
Ron Paul - TX
James Sensenbrenner - WI
Tom Tancredo - CO
Lynn Westmoreland - GA

Still Think Fox News Is "Fair and Balanced?"

Atrios reports, you decide:

Before the official announcement that Vice Admiral Allen was taking over Katrina duties from Brown, he'd already been scheduled as a guest on Fox News Sunday.

Your Rights Slowly Taken Away

Two items. First, as Ron Davis pointed out, the Bush administration has seen fit to suspend the Second Amendment in New Orleans. Now the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals says they can imprison you without trial, indefinitely.

A decision by the 4th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the federal government's right to hold an American citizen in custody indefinitely a so-called "enemy combatant" without bringing criminal charges against him.

The case was brought by attorneys for Jose Padilla, am American citizen who has been held in a brig in a naval brig for more than three years without charge after being arrested on American soil.

The government has alleged that Padilla had trained at al-Qaeda terrorist camps and had plans to blow up buildings in the United States. To date, Padilla has not been charged with any specific crime.

Padilla's attorneys and civil rights advocates said the detention was illegal and could easily lead to abuses by the government who could then arrest almost anybody for protesting against government policy or even taking out the "wrong" books from the public library.

No right to meet with an attorney. No right to face your accusers. Bush can label you an "enemy combatant" and imprison you until the day you die. Do you feel safer with George W. Bush as president?

Friday Beagle Blogging

"I'd prefer you didn't read over my shoulder."

Long Time, No See

The events of the past couple weeks kept me away from blogging. Too glued to news reports from mainstream media and bloggers to contribute much. Thoughts still jumbled, but I'll try to put some together.

Most importantly, please do what you can to help those who've lost everything. The horrors of Katrina won't go away soon. One item I don't see mentioned nearly enough...give blood. Local agencies aren't just supplying local needs now.

What's My Pirate Name?

My pirate name is:

Dirty Harry Flint

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Iraq Bloodshed May Get Worse

Note that, at the time of this posting, 75 soldiers have lost their lives while Bush has been "getting on with his life." And now a senior U.S. commander is predicting things are going to get worse.

From the Associated Press:

A senior U.S. commander in Iraq predicted Friday that insurgent violence will increase in the Sunni-dominated areas he commands north of Baghdad, but he also said there is a growing confidence among Iraqis that the insurgents will fail to stop planned elections in October and December.

Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto, commander of the 22,000-soldier Task Force Liberty, also said that while his election security plan does not require any additional U.S. troops, he could use extra help if it were offered by Gen. George Casey, the top overall commander in Iraq, who is assessing election security needs.

[snip]

We expect that the enemies will increase their attacks, particularly as we run up to the referendum," he said. "The divergent groups all have their own strategies and they select a time for these attacks. But they go up and then we'll have a week or two where the attacks will go down, and they seem to rearm themselves and then re- attack."

Asked why the U.S. military has been unable thus far to defeat the insurgents, Taluto said progress is being made and it is not widely recognized that U.S. troops stop many attacks before they can be executed. On the other hand, he said, it also is true that the insurgents have become part of the fabric of Iraqi life.

"They are intrinsic, and so it seems like they can act with impunity," Taluto said. "And then they do escalate their activities, so they surge and so on and so forth."

Have we turned another corner yet?

Bad People Scare Little Girl

So the campus newspaper at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) has, for two years, been printing stories, columns, letters, etc. about a motherless little girl who's Marine father is deployed in Iraq. And recently they reported the father had been killed. One problem. It was all a hoax.

From the Chicago Tribune [via the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader]:

Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant's little girl, a precocious, blond-haired child they'd grown to love, was now an orphan.

They all knew Kodee Kennings' mother died when she was 5. The little girl's fears and frustrations about her father being in harm's way had played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings, innocent observations and questions about why daddy wasn't there to chase the monsters from under her bed.

It turns out daddy didn't exist at all.

[snip]

Using role players, including an employee of a local Christian radio station, the woman at the center of the hoax spun a remarkable wartime tale so compelling it grabbed the hearts of young journalists, university faculty members and readers, and left them blind to the possibility it could all be a ruse. There appears never to have been a monetary motive. In fact, the reasons behind all the lies remain unclear.

[snip]

The Tribune traced the license plate of Hastings' car, and by Wednesday afternoon, a reporter was outside a home in Marion, Ill., looking for a woman named Jaimie Reynolds.

Reynolds agreed to talk.

Sitting on the back porch of her house wearing a maroon, long-sleeved Southern Illinois University shirt, her face flush from crying, Reynolds admitted she had pretended to be Colleen Hastings. She said Dan Kennings was invented, and those who met him had actually met a friend of hers who agreed to play the role.

She said, and the Tribune confirmed, that she was a broadcast journalism student at Southern Illinois. She graduated in 2004, putting her there alongside the very people she was deceiving.

Reynolds acknowledged the little girl actually is the daughter of friends, and said she persuaded the parents to let her bring the child regularly to Carbondale by saying she was filming a documentary about a soldier killed in Iraq.

"We told her it was for a movie," Reynolds said.

The Daily Egyptian has removed all of the previous articles, columns, and letters from their archives. However, the person who directed me to this article found the very first "introduction" article in Google’s cache. Get this:

But southern Illinois has proved to be just as much of a challenge. They keep her away from all the war coverage on television unless her dad shows up and home-school her because normal schools cover the war and try to keep her away from war protest.

That last one becomes a challenge anytime she comes to the SIUC campus with Matt. An avid Saluki fan, Kodee loves SIU, but she hates seeing "no war" scrawled on the walls of Faner and becomes confused when reading slogans such as "Bush is the Devil."

To Kodee, Bush is her father's boss and she does not understand why people think he is evil. She has also has a very difficult time understanding the war protesters and has begun to fear them the way most kids fear the boogeyman or monsters.

She calls them "the bad people," and is convinced they are going to come to her house at night to hurt her or camp out on the lawn and make her father not want to come home.

Every night, Matt and Colleen have to check under Kodee's bed and in the closet for "the bad people." They also have to double check to make sure the window is locked and investigate any sound that comes from outside.

Colleen said Kodee routinely wakes up at night screaming, fearful that "the bad people" are going to get her.

"To you and I, it's a crazy thought, but in her mind, it's as real as the telephone you're holding," Colleen said during a phone interview. "The fear is just so real."

Those mean ole anti-war protesters are frightening a (fictitious) little girl who's daddy is fighting for truth, justice and the American Way in Iraq. Bad people. Shame on them.

Too bad none of it was true.

SIU has a respectable journalism program. This won't help it. And removing all the "evidence" of the hoax from the newspaper's Web site may not be the best way to handle this.

Friday Beagle Blogging

Baxter in one of his seven favorite napping locations, my chair.