It Must Be Bush's Fault

It can be addictive reading the Huffington Post and seeing how many ways they can blame Bush for the disaster in New Orleans. No matter what he does, it is absolutely the wrong thing. Here are some examples:

Arianna herself on the Flyover President.

The president's 35-minute Air Force One flyover of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was the perfect metaphor for his entire presidency: detached, disconnected, and disengaged. Preferring to take in America's suffering -- whether caused by the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina -- from a distance. In this case, 2,500 feet.

And if he had toured the disaster area personally from a helecopter she would have complained that he was taking up valuable resources that could have been used to rescue survivers.

Laurisa Alexandrovna - a classic.

On September 11, 2001, The Vacationing and un-elected President of this country was tooling around on his holiday and even making time to fit in a little PR in Florida too

So Bush is at fault for not reacting to 9/11 before it happened?

So while children are drowning and others are floating around, dead in the water, the wannabe Yale cowboy struts around the set of his faux town hall meetings, has a bit of cake with John McCain, and takes in some fresh air in Colorado.

This is echoing Cindy Sheehan's complaint. How dare Bush do anything when people are dead? There's more but if I dig any more I'm going to need a rabies shot.

Dal LaMagna (among many others) complains about the number of National Guard in Iraq.

We’ve got more than 118,000 National Guardsmen and women on active duty either in Iraq or supporting war efforts there, which clearly makes the number of people available for our own disaster-relief services smaller.

We’ve got about 4,300 National Guard currently supporting the cleanup efforts from Hurricane Katrina, now believed to be even more catastrophic in human and economic terms than Hurricane Andrew.

Where is the perspective?

Actually, the number is up to 26,000 guards called up to help with the disaster. This is more than have been mobilized for any prior disaster.

Harry Shearer posts constantly. In one he asks

from the President's late Wednesday afternoon White House remarks tell the whole story. As he enumerated the impressive-sounding statistics, he added, in a fillip intended to sound determined and forward-looking, "And we're just getting started." Some of us are already wondering, what took you so long?

Let's see - the storm hit Monday morning. It was Tuesday before the damage could be assessed. By that time, Bush had already ordered that a response package be put together. He announced the specifics Wednesday afternoon. I doubt that a response that specific has been put together that fast before.

In a different one he writes:

Fortunately, some in the very old-fashioned newspaper business have been covering budget issues. Hence, this summary of articles cataloguing the steady reduction in federal funds for shoring up the levee system, and the 17th St floodwall, in the New Orleans-Jefferson Parish area.

I could write a book on the trade-offs involved. Bush critics want to see more spent on supplies for the troops in Iraq but don't want the money to come from anywhere. There is the question of how much federal money should be spent on a purely local issue (that's a book in itself). Then there is the problem that the current levee system was never meant to withstand a category 4 hurricane and a massive storm surge. Regardless, it is all Bush's fault.

Then there is the all-time champion post. It's Reagan's fault .

Still I am wondering if those voters in Louisiana and Mississippi who helped polluter-allied Reagan win in 1980 would have found themselves fated differently under a second Carter term. If Carter came in, we could have had an alternative fuels program and tighter auto emission standards in effect by now. Sparked by his prodding, we might have had decades of global warming controls in place.

Whose to say if those steps might not have rendered the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf even 1/100th of a degree cooler than they are now?

Right. The least effective president in modern times (with the possible exception of Gerald Ford) would have stopped global warming. At a time when climatologists thought that the next ice age was coming. Global warming was first announced as a theory in 1988 and Carter's second term would have ended in 1985.

It is possible to find fault with anyone if you look hard enough. I could point out that a rich woman like Arianna could be spending all of her time raising money and materials to help. Instead she complains about others.

Could Bush have responded differently? Yes. Would it have made any difference given the unpresidented magnitude of the storm? No. The moonbats at Huffington just love to find excuses to bash Bush.