American ideals shaken

Catholic New Times, Sept 25, 2005

"Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency)--a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association--admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president recently hailed him in Mobile, Ala.: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle--Dick Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyomingi and Condi Rice, who was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue (Rice was caught buying a US$2,000 pair of shoes there)--lacked empathy, but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice-president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans--most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first--they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

"Who are we if we can't take care of our own?"

--Maureen Dowd in New York Times

"To have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the truth--that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most extreme straits."

--Michael Parenti on ZNet