Collateral Damage

The images of devastation along the Gulf Coast are reminiscent of similar images in the wake of the recent Asian tsunami disaster. It looks like the sort of damage Americans are used to seeing in far away third world countries.

Hurricane Katrina was, indeed, a natural disaster of catastrophic proportions, a ferocious storm of a magnitude seldom seen or felt. However, it seems that the ensuing flooding that has turned New Orleans onto a festering cesspool may have been more made-made than few care to mention, and speaks volumes about the tragic direction in which this country is headed under this reckless administration.

According to Will Bunch, (senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News), writing in Editor & Publisher (www.editorandpublisher.com) following flooding in 1995 congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next ten years the Army Corps of Engineers spent some $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations. $250 million in vital projects remained, but in 2003 federal funding slowed to a “trickle”. According to Mr. Bunch “At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane and flood-control dollars.”

Mr. Bunch reports that In June of 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Also that June the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and “essentially begged” for $2 million for urgent work for which Washington was now unable to pay. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

Following the 2004 hurricane season, one of the worst in history, the Bush budget featured “the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history”. The lack of funding lead to a hiring freeze, as there was no money to start new jobs.

One unfinished project was at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday, according to Mr. Bunch.

He cites The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night that observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House.“

The catastrophe along the Gulf Coast is the ultimate in collateral damage from the insanity that is the war in Iraq. Billions in resources have already been wasted on this fiasco (with countless billions still to be wasted), and the dimwitted commander-in-chief drones on and on with his alarmingly delusional rhetoric. Urgent priorities at home give way to "freedom" in Iraq and a maniacally relentless tilting at windmills in the sand.

We can only hope that an increasingly restive public begins to finally reject this madness. Maybe they will realize what a disaster they have bought for themselves with this little man from Crawford. For while he is a comfortable distance from the twisted wreckage and the stench of death and suffering (for which he will never admit any measure of responsibility), it will be left for others to clean up the mess, which will take years.

Summer Of Cindy

The din from the ranks of the Bush apologists is thunderous--Fox News is in full attack mode; the noxious pundits, from the hateful Ann Coulter to the loathsome Michelle Malkin, from the Bush bootlicker Sean Hannity, to the "fat-assed drug addict" Rush Limbaugh, have descended, like a fetid mushroom cloud, upon the airwaves in a full court press to silence a grieving mother from Vacaville, California, (a location which Fox's John Gibson, another Bush ass-kisser, was quick to remind us, with a fair and balanced wink, is in close proximity to the UC campuses of Berkeley and Davis, whatever that means).

Bill O'Reilly was even distracted from his summer-long obsession with a missing teenager to focus his self-serving, bullying gaze upon the events in Crawford, opining that Mrs. Sheehan was "in bed with the Left", (which to O'Reilly and the neocon machine includes anyone a single degree to the left of Sen. John McCain). When Sheehan refused to appear on his show O'Reilly brought on Dolores Kesterson, whose son Eric was killed in Iraq. In an admirable display of humble truth to arrogant power, Kesterson refuted O'Reilly's accusations against Sheehan and withstood his barrage of regurgitated Bush/RNC tripe. Most telling was Kesterson's account of standing face to face with Bush and the utter lack of conscience that she felt from him.

Cindy Sheehan has struck a subliminal nerve in the country's collective conscience and the National Security State ghouls have descended upon her like antibodies attacking a virulent pathogen, hellbent on wiping out the offending organism before it inflicts lethal damage upon their most favored host. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention, that this women, the latest in a long line of administration critics, (specifically in regard to its Iraq policy), would be trashed and smeared, just like former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neil; former National Security aide Richard Clarke; former ambassador Joe Wilson; and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, to name a few. In the shameful absence of the neutered and hapless Democrats, Cindy has emerged as the de facto "leader" of a growing anti-war movement, and will have to suffer the slings and arrows of the murderous right.

I don't expect that the President will meet with Sheehan. I wouldn't either. I wouldn't want to look in the eyes of a mother who lost a child in a war that I started under false pretenses. I certainly wouldn't want to risk the scrutiny of a private audience to the turgid platitudes that have been worn to bare threads from the once whole cloth of unity that enveloped the nation (and most of the civilized world) in the aftermath of 9/11.

Pat Buchanan, one of the few "conservatives" worthy of the the name, has written of Sheehan as an "anti-war catalyst" and of giving "a voice, a face, and a moral authority" to the growing anti-war movement. He makes comparisons to the summer of 1969, the nascent Nixon presidency, and the Vietnam War. Like many of us he's seen this kind of thing before.

Christopher Hitchens, condemning Sheehan in an essay at Slate.com writes, "I distrust anyone who claims to speak for the fallen, and I distrust even more the hysterical noncombatants who exploit the grief of those who have to bury them." I do not claim to speak for the fallen, and I too distrust anyone who claims to speak for them, but I distrust most of all the hysterical noncombatants who exploit the trauma of a national tragedy, and show absolutely no conscience at the carnage that they encourage, all in the name of "a noble cause".