When Foresight Was 20/20

George Bush on CNN about New Orleans: "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."

I’ve been trying to figure out that whole not-foreseeing thing. Please follow me as I attempt to unravel this one.

Naturally, when the Philadelphia Inquirer had an article last year about the danger to New Orleans of taking a hurricane hit head-on, George Bush ignored it. You can’t read newspapers that put the word “Inquirer” in their name. You do that with one, pretty soon you’re sliding down that slippery slope and the next thing you know you’re reading on a regular basis.

Could George have watched the in-depth report on the problem presented by the PBS show NOW with Bill Moyers in 2002? Daniel Zwerdling talked to scientists and community leaders about how New Orleans could be devastated in any year by a hurricane. Surely our President can have his people watch TV when something comes on that might be important?

No! He could not, not if Bill Moyers is involved. Besides, Zwerdling sounds like Nerdling. You know how sensitive our President is to being perceived as an intellectual. George “best tee-totaler to have a beer with” Bush can’t be seen as having even heard of PBS.

The same argument applies to the long 2001 article that appeared on the subject in Scientific American. Scientific American? What’s that? Some magazine for global-warming evolutionist stem-cell murdering crazies? Probable reaction: “Not my constituency.”

But then I found out that USA Today had warned of the danger even before that, in 2000! Help me! I cannot imagine how President Bush can say that something is unforeseeable when even USA Today could and did foresee it, five years ago!

Sure, Bush doesn’t read. He prefers to listen only to the single lone voice of God in his head, never to the billions of voices of God outside his head, the voices that his head and ears were presumably designed to listen to. But of all the thousands of people working in the executive branch directly under Bush, there isn’t one person he listens to that reads USA Today? What do they all read, cereal boxes?

Here are some more confusing comments about the New Orleans disaster. When it was suggested, as I have just done, that the administration had not done all it could do to prepare for this disaster, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan said, “This is not a time for finger-pointing or playing politics.” But, after changing channels, the very next thing I hear is Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a part of the executive branch of government (Bush’s branch), saying victims of Katrina were to blame for their own problems, for not heeding mandatory evacuation notices.

Excuse me, are we finger-pointing or aren’t we? We can point at victims but we can’t point at Bush? How about I point at this: the people who stayed behind were all the poorest people in the area and they received little to no assistance from FEMA to comply with those evacuation notices. Were they all supposed to have taken their private doctors along with them in Lear jets to Lanai to stay there until New Orleans is reassembled?

Well before Katrina hit, interstate buses leaving New Orleans were locked down.

Now I want to talk about the fact that Senator Trent Lott is homeless, too. As reported in the Seattle Times, Katrina leveled Lott’s 154 year-old Pascagoula home. The fact was mentioned by Bill Frist the next day as the Senate approved $10.5 billion in aid for areas affected by the hurricane.

Such aid may help rebuild Trent Lott’s house. I hope so, because, as I have always said, “If there’s just one homeless person in America, that’s one too many.”

Provided he takes responsibility for himself and goes out and gets a real job.