Published:
Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked
White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's
failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in
The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and
the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately
to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly
and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.
Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with
ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and
with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe
on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into
comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and
relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.
The president didn't seem to notice.
Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up
in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by
human feces.
Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing
distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the
richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to
notice.
Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television,
and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more
used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers,
dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.
Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases
die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the
president of the
He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white
and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the
George W. Bush administration, still invisible.
After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from
conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the
president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of
criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something
tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this
administration.)
Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that
he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded,
hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point
about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent
Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a
fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a
president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as
the overwhelming agony of the city of
And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage
continues to mount in
Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has
been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the
political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is
not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so
obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest
of us, like the people left stranded in