It never ends with this administration.
From an article written by Lisa Rosetta in yesterday's Salt Lake Tribune:
Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA. ...
Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
That's right. The feds have flown in specialists who actually want to help save lives -- so Worst President Ever can have his picture taken with them. Lives are at stake right now, but that doesn't matter to BushCo because now they have a chance at a kick-ass photo op like the one to the right.
"Wicked cool. Hey fellas, wanna go help me clear some brush?"
I could rant about this for several paragraphs, but instead I'll simply repost what Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos wrote today on his site, because it's damn near perfect:
This is it. This is absolutely the most fucked up thing ever done by this president, in a long list of fucked up things. ...
Bush's use of firefighters as human props doesn't win the "most fucked up" prize because it was the most costly for the nation -- the Iraq War wins hands down. It doesn't win because it caused the most deaths, or damaged the reputation of the U.S. the most, or harmed national security by outing undercover CIA agents. In the greater scheme of things, this may seem as small fry compared to the long stream of serious failures in this White House.
It's the most fucked up because it is easily the most crassly political act ever taken by this administration. Bush is so thoroughly a PR vessel that he can't even tour a disaster zone without his human backdrop. He's been a PR marionette for so long -- clear brush for the cameras! -- that he's become thoroughly incapable of keeping it real. God forbid he try to connect with people, get a better understanding of their efforts to cope with real disaster. That's not worth his time. Nope, it's got to be turned into a frickin' Bush campaign commercial. Everything is political. Everything.
It suddenly puts those Coast Guard helicopters in that photo op in clearer perspective, doesn't it? With the assembled military and Coast Guard personnel standing at attention in the background.
This is a clear signal of the depravity of this administration, were everything is political and nothing can be real. Nothing can be done simply because it's the right thing to do, or it's the best thing for America. There is a "real" America, and then there's Rove's America, where firemen serve the Republican Party and their leader, not people in distress. The Republican banner flies over the Stars and Stripes.
There is no excuse for this. None.
Absolutely couldn't have written it better myself. If you're one of those oddballs who voted for Bush because, well, gee, you just couldn't get behind John Kerry, you might want to ask yourself how a President Kerry would have responded to something like this. I guarantee you he'd be more concerned with saving lives than with making sure the photographers get his good side.
And this isn't a Kerry vs. Bush thing, either. I have some serious difficulty imagining any person of any party who would be handling this ordeal any worse than Puppet Boy. Papa Bush was rather detached from reality, but it's hard to imagine he'd be either so inept or so flagrantly uncaring that the deaths of a few thousand poor Americans wouldn't phase him. Sen. Rick Santorum isn't a big fan of single moms or black people, so maybe he'd take a similar approach. I'm sure Jeb would find a way to fuck it up, too.
In the end, BushCo was more concerned with Terri Schiavo, a brain-dead white chick who'd been in a coma for 15 years, than with several thousand impoverished (mostly black) Americans.
Elections have consequences, and they reach far beyond who's going to sit on the Supreme Court and whether or not states will have the legal authority to prohibit abortions. If Americans continue to choose the human equivalent of cartoons to run the country, Americans are going to suffer consequences. There is nothing in Boy Bush's history that suggests he's even remotely qualified to protect Americans from anything, whether it be a flood or a crazy dude living in a cave on the other side of the world. He's too busy falling off bikes and worshipping at the corporate altar to care about whether or not a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million Americans fall by the wayside. People are dying? Shrug. The middle class is eroding? No matter. How are the billionaires doing? They're all that matters.
Each day that passes, the morality line blurs between Baby Bush and Saddam Hussein. Until last week, I never knew that Kurds lived in America. Apparently, they did -- in the area just south of Lake Ponchartrain and north of the Gulf of Mexico. In due time, Worst President Ever will figure out ways to completely finish them off. Maybe he'll suspend relief efforts. Maybe he'll deny recovery funding so he can issue a few more tax cuts before he leaves office. Maybe he'll just line them all up, have them shot in the heads, and be done with it so he can concentrate on ruining social security and creating a future generation of financially insolvent elderly people.
Whatever Bush decides to do next, I assure you that it will be bad for the American people. After all, five years into his presidency, why should he break with tradition now?
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