Bush and Katrina

It’s impossible to consider George W. Bush pathetic. He has his hands on too much destructive power. He uses it. He is arrogant. He lies with nearly every breath.

But watching him bumble through the Gulf Coast and New Orleans on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s powerful strike and the U.S. government’s worse-than-empty response
creates a feeling of unreality. Can he really be saying those things? Does he believe empty phrases work for him?

Take his major comment: “I’ve come back to New Orleans to tell you the words that I spoke on Jackson Square are just as true today as they were then.” That’s when he promised all the government aid necessary to rebuild New Orleans. So little came in over the past year that few could find his new promise to help the people of the region comforting. It was a lie then. It is a lie now.

He had one moment of sincere regret. His friend, the racist millionaire Missis sippi Senator Trent Lott, lost his seaside mansion to the storm. Bush could empath ize with this loss. This was one of his own.

The rest is an act, an attempt to feign concern and care. Touring the still unreconstructed disaster area, where almost no help has arrived, Bush tried in vain to spin the events to make himself look good.

He laid his hand on the shoulders of local politicians, visited the renowned Fats Domino, appeared on television with a few repaired homes in the picture—while half the people remained dispersed and the homes wrecked last year lay rotting just outside the well-framed images. Does he believe this will recoup his political losses?

Bush seems detached from the reality of his current position. He and his cronies in the administration act as though nothing has changed since 2003, when Commander-in-Chief Bush declared “Mission accomplished” from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Since then, they have failed to stabilize their occupation of Iraq, leaving it an open sore. They have lost control of Afghan istan. They backed Israel’s failed attack on Lebanon. And they so botched up the Katrina disaster last year that a large section of the population consider them either incompetent fools or evil ones.

The Bush gang is still dangerous because U.S. imperialism can’t accept defeat. But the Katrina disaster has exposed its racism and its inability to organize society to help the population. It has already exhausted any legitimacy it might have had in the eyes of the world.