In Louisiana, everyone is talking about the California wildfires, though not always for the reason one might think. Yesterday, Our Dear Leader Bush went to San Diego to visit the disaster victims. In the course of his four hour visit, he told California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: "It makes a significant difference when you have somebody in the statehouse willing to take the lead."
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco took this as a swipe at her response to Hurricane Katrina. The New York Times interprets it this way, and I do too. I suppose an apologist for the White House will argue that this was not the intent, but the jibe was aimed at an unnamed state that suffered a major natural disaster characterized by a poor local response. Does anything else come to mind besides Katrina?
This is simply pathetic, quite low even on the Bush scale for shameless pander. He goes to California, and uses the disaster there to offer another lame excuse for his failure to answer the bell when Katrina hit. This man will stoop to any depth to find someone else to blame for his own shortcomings.
It is not as if the Katrina shot was the only stupid thing he said that day. Here's another one:
There's all kinds of time for historians to compare this response or that response. I'm thinking about people whose lives turned upside down. The experts can try to figure out if the response was perfect.
The experts can figure it out? As the President, the Commander-in-Chief, the Man On Top, who else would be in charge of determining the effectiveness of the response? Pardon me, but I thought the White House was the ultimate authority on the quality of federal response. It is ridiculous for the President to publicly state that he is more concerned with individuals than the big picture. This is exactly the opposite of how it should be. There are thousands of federal employees whose job it is to think about people whose lives turned upside down. There is only one person high enough to judge the quality of the response and to do something about it, and that one person prefers to cede the job to the historians.
From Louisiana's point of view, it is difficult to be anything but dispirited over this turn of events. Katrina was two years ago, and Louisiana, while minding its own business, trying to recover from unprecedented disaster, and gets a cheap shot from California. It is not right that a major disaster elsewhere, nothing to do with us, becomes an occasion for a sucker punch. And that it should come from the President of the United States is the worst part of it all.
When I watch footage of Californians returning to their completely destroyed homes, I feel a great deal of sympathy. Been there, done that. This morning on National Public Radio I listened to one fire victim who explained that he lost every baby picture he ever had of his teenaged son. I know the feeling: This is the unexpected collateral damage. We expect to lose furniture and clothing and appliances -- the big stuff -- but it is the little stuff that really hurts. Even two years later, from time to time I remember a little thing I once had and pause. There was the wooden rocking horse my wife used as a child and she passed on to our children; an antique stethoscope owned by my great grandfather; a photo of my grandfather when he was in college; a bottle of champagne reserved from our wedding day. None of these things will ever come back.
So it pains me to see Katrina once again politicized. When President Bush appeared on national television a week after Katrina, with the St. Louis Cathedral in the background, and promised that New Orleans would be rebuilt, there was great relief. Louisianans know from experience than anything can be polluted by the dirty hands of politicians. Perhaps this time, this one time, we would avoid politics, and rebuilding would promptly begin.
Garbage. We haven't had a politics-free day since, and the President dumped a brand-new layer on top yesterday. There is no end of contempt that I hold for that vile man. He has, to my knowledge, only once set foot in St. Bernard Parish, a place where 68,000 people lost their homes in August of 2005. Sixty-eight thousand. That is a massive loss to merit almost no presidential attention. The California fires, bad as they are, do not compare to that, not even close. St. Bernard voted for Bush in 2000 and again in 2004, and this is the thanks we get.
I know he doesn't want to do anything else for us, not with the expenses of his pet war draining the coffers. If this must be, then let it be, but for God's sake, at least stop the political finger pointing. Some of us who lost our homes are not politicians, and we are tired of being told we are to blame for our losses.