"Impeach Bush Before More Die"

(Moving some more things over. I &hearts Paul Craig Roberts' columns and you will too. I just found a new one of his, so it seemed meet to move this one now.)


You might remember Paul Craig Roberts, but, being at this blog as you are, it's probably not for serving as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during Reagan's administration. And you probably don't recall his name from roll calls at the Hoover Institution. You probably don't even know that he's a John M. Olin fellow; it was news to me.

I'd wager that if you're familiar with Paul Craig Roberts, it's likely because of his column, "A Reputation in Tatters", in which he called for impeachment based on the Downing Street Memos. You may even have the lede committed to memory: George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America's reputation.

Now that you've been reacquainted, it might interest you to know that he is still plenty peeved with shrubya, especially regarding Katrina. So peeved, in fact, his new article is titled "Failure on Every Front," and its lede is just as good as the previous one:

The raison d'etre of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure America's oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically.

Bush's single-minded focus on the "war against terrorism" has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The US has lost its largest and most strategic port, thousands of lives, and 80% of one of America's most historic cities is under water.

If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history.

If you ask me, this is a point that isn't being mentioned enough: what if this had been a terrorist attack?  Is this what we can expect in way of a response? This is what the upheaval of FEMA and the creation of DHS - which belies "small government" in and of itself - has done for us? Color me terrified, indeed.

The Bush cabal, stunningly, didn't seem to think that safeguarding the nation's largest port was of any particular importance. You'd think it would have been more dear to his heart, given the concentration of oil production in the area. But no, as during Vietnam, shrubya had other priorities, namely Iraq.

Roberts hits on this point, too, mentioning SELA and the diversion of its funding to shrubya's diversion in the middle east.

Every expert and newspapers as distant as Texas saw the New Orleans catastrophe coming. But President Bush and his insane government preferred war in Iraq to protecting Americans at home.

Bush's war left the Corps of Engineers only 20% of the funding to protect New Orleans from flooding from Lake Pontchartrain.

"Insane," "staggeringly inept," "criminally incompetent" - choose your favorite; they all work. There is simply no explanation within the bounds of reason to not fund these protections, given that the budget required would be 1/10th the cost of clean-up and recovery. But we all know that long-term thinking isn't exactly shrubya's strong suit.

Long-term vacations, on the other hand, seem to be his forte. For the first three days of the worst natural disaster in this nation's history, shrubya stayed on vacation - yukking it up with senior citizens, having cake with McCain. Presidentin's Hard Work, you know. But it seems Roberts needs a reminder:

Not content with leaving New Orleans unprotected, it took the Bush administration five days to get the remnants of the National Guard not serving in Iraq, along with desperately needed food and water, to devastated New Orleans. This is the slowest emergency response by the US government in modern times. By the time the Bush administration could organize any resources for New Orleans, many more people had died and the city was in total chaos.

Despite the most dismal performance on record, Bush's Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, said on Thursday that the Bush administration has done a "magnificent job."

He then discusses the tremendous impact this will have on our economy - again, wtf was bush thinking?!? Oh yeah...never mind. Indeed, the word on everybody's tongues is "incompetent," but Roberts really gets behind the sentiment.

The destruction of New Orleans is the responsibility of the most incompetent government in American history and perhaps in all history.

Americans are rapidly learning that they were deceived by the superpower hubris. The powerful US military cannot successfully occupy Baghdad or control the road to the airport--and this against an insurgency based in only 20% of the Iraqi population. Bush's pointless war has left Washington so pressed for money that the federal government abandoned New Orleans to catastrophe.

The Bush administration is damned by its gross incompetence.

Sadly, so are the rest of us.

The neoconservatives have brought these disasters to all Americans, Democrat and Republican alike. Now they must he held accountable. Bush and his neoconservatives are guilty of criminal negligence and must be prosecuted.

...What disaster will next spring from Bush's incompetence?

Oooh! There's that word again!