Bush Is Not Responsible.
Bush is not, in fact, responsible for the failure to act after Hurricane Katrina.
Just like he wasn't responsible for using bad intelligence to get us into the Iraq War, or for the horrible torture of people at Abu Ghraib.
We all know that he didn't order soldiers to torture people at Abu Ghraib. The soldiers obviously took up the idea themselves and carried it out without any of their commanding officers having any power to stop them.
We all know that the Niger yellow cake was a lie that the CIA thought up. They must have ignored Bush's orders to find the best, most reliable information out there and instead came up with a few things to snicker at when Bush said them on t.v. in front of the whole nation as if they were true.
But the strongest proof of all is Hurricane Katrina and FEMA's pathetic response to it. The National Response Plan of 2004 states that the Secretary of Homeland Security "has been directed to assume incident management policies by the President." I'm sure that Bush was calling Chertoff every day telling him to actually get off his ass and go help those who were stranded, but that Chertoff decided to take his sweet time rather than listen to his boss.
This leads me to believe that Bush couldn't possibly be responsible. But it also leads me to an even starker, more frightening belief: that the office of President no longer matters.
Being the head of the government no longer gives one any power to reign in, challenge, or command in any way those beneath one in the chain of government. Traditionally, the Commander-in-Chief could have stopped soldiers from abusing prisoners of war. He could have told the CIA to thoroughly verify any intelligence that could send our nation to war before presenting it to the people. And he could have ordered the head of FEMA to do something immediately instead of letting people starve, dehydrate, drown, and rot in a city that had just suffered a predictable (and anticipated) natural disaster. He would have been able to wield the magnificent powers bestowed on him by the Constitution and over 200 years of precedent, if his office were still relevant.
Who is our leader, if not the President?
Just like he wasn't responsible for using bad intelligence to get us into the Iraq War, or for the horrible torture of people at Abu Ghraib.
We all know that he didn't order soldiers to torture people at Abu Ghraib. The soldiers obviously took up the idea themselves and carried it out without any of their commanding officers having any power to stop them.
We all know that the Niger yellow cake was a lie that the CIA thought up. They must have ignored Bush's orders to find the best, most reliable information out there and instead came up with a few things to snicker at when Bush said them on t.v. in front of the whole nation as if they were true.
But the strongest proof of all is Hurricane Katrina and FEMA's pathetic response to it. The National Response Plan of 2004 states that the Secretary of Homeland Security "has been directed to assume incident management policies by the President." I'm sure that Bush was calling Chertoff every day telling him to actually get off his ass and go help those who were stranded, but that Chertoff decided to take his sweet time rather than listen to his boss.
This leads me to believe that Bush couldn't possibly be responsible. But it also leads me to an even starker, more frightening belief: that the office of President no longer matters.
Being the head of the government no longer gives one any power to reign in, challenge, or command in any way those beneath one in the chain of government. Traditionally, the Commander-in-Chief could have stopped soldiers from abusing prisoners of war. He could have told the CIA to thoroughly verify any intelligence that could send our nation to war before presenting it to the people. And he could have ordered the head of FEMA to do something immediately instead of letting people starve, dehydrate, drown, and rot in a city that had just suffered a predictable (and anticipated) natural disaster. He would have been able to wield the magnificent powers bestowed on him by the Constitution and over 200 years of precedent, if his office were still relevant.
Who is our leader, if not the President?
posted by EHR at 10:45 AM
1 Comments:
Nice one, Brad! Give the bastards hell!
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