The elephant in the room

(Read time: 5 minutes)

To my last breath, I will remember sitting in the comfort of my living room in the wake of Katrina and watching Americans waiting to be rescued.

Waiting in hellish and inhumane conditions without food or water. Waiting on an Interstate bridge in the hot sun. Waiting for endless days. Americans.

In America, would I be listening to doctors and nurses at New Orleans' “Big Charity” hospital pleading, in tears, with news reporters to get the word out their patients were dying?

Brave and overwhelmed reporters and camera crews, sloshing through body-strewn and infested water in the streets of one of America’s oldest cities? If they were there from day one, where was the federal government?

In a twist of irony, the victims of this storm, Mississippians and Louisianans living in the very heart of Bush country, had no electricity and could not see this human misery unfold in real and endless time.

I believe Lt. Gen. Russell Honore’s cavalry charge into New Orleans could have come at least a day sooner and was timed to coincide with the president’s first visit into the area that same day, Friday, 2 September 2005 - the fifth day of the disaster. I will always believe it. I know the 120-mile route from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to New Orleans, and it’s not like Honore had to move his troops through the Khyber Pass or cross the Alps on elephants. LINK

The person in charge throughout this nightmare is still in charge today.

Katrina hit New Orleans at 6:10 a.m., 29 August 2005. Incredulously, four days later, George W. Bush said, “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Hell, I had known that was a possibility for years.

In his first four years in office, Bush’s administration scored 34 major scandals. These scandals have been fully documented by Salon.com, which succinctly lists each, with its effect and outcome, at this site: LINK

Since the beginning of his second term, we have seen the incompetence of FEMA. We have seen a covert CIA operative outed apparently for political revenge. We have seen the Patriot Act abused in some inexplicable and zealous attempt to spy on Americans. We are now learning that U.S. attorneys might have been fired because they didn’t play along with, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ recently departed chief of staff put it, “the Bushies.”

Looming over all these scandals is Bush’s neocon-inspired, misbegotten mission in Iraq: to spread democracy throughout the Middle East while securing this country’s insatiable “addiction to oil.”

In 1968, a very popular book by Dr. Laurence Peter laid out “The Peter Principle,” which basically asserts that every employee in a structured hierarchy, i.e., the federal government, rises to the level of his or her incompetence.

Maybe George W. Bush is not an evil man. If “evil” means putting ambition and ideology above moral and humane ideals, then, in my opinion, Bush has surrounded himself with evil persons and has allowed them to tarnish the lustre of what Ronald Reagan, in John Winthrop’s words, called "this shining city upon a hill.”

Winthrop went on to say that if we forsake the moral high ground, “we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”

People high up the hierarchy of this administration have fallen by the wayside, have resigned, have been convicted of criminal behavior, have fallen on their swords.

Three who were with Bush from the outset remain entrenched in his inner circle: Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

When are Americans going to face reality: that the man in charge, the man in the Oval Office simply reached his level of incompetence when he took on the highest job in the land?

When is anyone going to blame the elephant in the room?