Letter to Joe

Regarding Katrina there is absolutely blame to be had all round. I personally think Ray Nagin was criminally incompetent and ran a criminally incompetent city. Nagin’s police murdered innocents in the chaotic aftermath of Katrina, and in my view were personally involved in looting and other lawlessness. Though he no doubt luxuriates in retirement or whatever living off the ill-gotten gain of his public service life, in my view life in prison would be too good for him. Governor Landrieu comes out a bit better, but only barely. The Bush administration was a complete failure.

But we were not talking about local leadership I was referring to the reprehensible job done by the Commander in Chief at the National level and the ridiculous suggestion that Obama is the worst president in the nation’s history. I follow Tony’s posts, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with anger, but I get the point. This was just too juicy to pass up.

Anyone who does not see or will not admit the complete failure of national leadership in New Orleans and the cost in human life that resulted from that failure is just not being honest.  Responsibility for the flooding was laid squarely on the Army Corps in January 2008 by Judge Stanwood Duval, US District Court.  The Army Corp of Engineers f***ed up the entire construction of the system of levees  they built to protect the city. Apparently levees should not be secured to sand berms. The Federal Government over many administrations failed completely in their task to protect the City. How ill-informed are you, Joe?

People died on the street for lack of water. Give Bush a pass on this and give up any creditability. The Federal, State, and local government didn’t do a thing to resolve the matter for three days until news footage shocked the nation. How far lost in the recesses of your political posturing is that simple fact lost? In my mind’s eye I can still conjure the image of an elderly wheel-chair bound lady, slouched over the edge of a lawn chair, dead. Is that one of the “ignorants” you refer to?

To place the blame on those who failed to leave and so “created their own mess” is repugnant. I know you are so tuned into your pre-arranged thought pattern that you will deny this so we’ll have to disagree, but your argument sounds as if it comes from someone that would deny any cost and deflect any blame so long as how it did not interfere with a carefully crafted narrative on which a fragile house of ideological cards is built. Good luck with that, but excuse me if your morality rings hollow.

Many of us on the left are stunned and confused with absolute vitriol directed at this president. The near irrational hatred runs from absurd conspiracy theories to birthers to zealots who are sure Obama is a Muslim (despite the Drone programs in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and so forth which have killed hundreds, some of them Muslim-American citizens without charges or trial), to the Socialist-Commie- Sympathizer crowd (Right, Tony?), to the death panels. Now with Santorum we hear attacks on Obama’s theology. Recognizing that s** won’t play with anyone but the right wing nut brigade he backtracks into a lie about environmental polices. Brilliant, just brilliant, and totally unelectable. The litany has been relentless and to all but the true believers on the extreme right, hysterical and to some measure silly.

So, liberals ask, “What has Obama done.” Well let’s see. He bailed out the auto companies, made a huge investment, bought a ton of stock and sort of out-right owned them for a while, but he saved over a million jobs. A fair argument can be made that the government ought not to picks winners and losers, and I for one believe the administration exaggerates when it claims it has or will get all the money back. But to call those of us who favored the government investment in saving a million jobs “Socialists” seem a bit extreme. Fair enough, pretty sure Obama will live with the label rather than the loss of American manufacturing jobs. I noticed though that Santorum’s manufacturing tax policy also picks winners and losers, but I guess that’s something different than Obama’s government engineering Socialism.

ObamaCare is of course another boogeyman to the right with Palin’s rattling death panels and government take-over of healthcare. So seldom does anyone on the right admit that the insurance companies already ration healthcare, based on cost,  that people die as a result of their inability to pay. Those I guess aren’t death panels. Private enterprise, free markets and all, guess we’ll have to call them something else.

Of course villainizing Obama over the Healthcare plan makes pleasing rhetoric to white-hot ears on the right, but in the end this was a huge gift to the insurance industry. The requirement that everyone needs to buy health care may not pass constitutional muster, but it can hardly be argued that those who can afford it and choose not to own it are a burden and pass their costs onto those that do buy insurance. Politicians have been grappling with this for decades.

At 17% of GDP, the quality of healthcare and the number of uninsured in America is a national disgrace. The suggestion that the government should require everyone that with the resources to do so to buy insurance is has been pushed before by Newt, The Heritage Foundation and of course Romney. That was not Socialism apparently. Obama’s legislation apparently is. Ok, so maybe I don’t see the opposition posture as being particularly credible on this.

TARP, the bailouts on Wall Street, and the $85 billion gift to a corrupt and failing AIG and so forth was all initiated under Bush to the tune of nearly a trillion, and then sustained by Obama. Wall Street got a big pass. F***ers! No limits on bonuses, no clearly called for criminal prosecutions, Dodd-Frank is a near joke. As of this writing hundreds of regulations have yet to be written. The right acts like Obama has nationalized Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and the other big banks. Bush, the Fed and Treasury made each of these banks gigantic, by pairing them one by one with weaker insanely leveraged investment banks and then investing $700 billion with no strings in the hope that it would spur lending. It did not. That Obama has done little to rein in or regulate these behemoths represents a failure on his administrations part to regain some measure of control over the capital markets.  Bonuses are sky high. Glass-Steagull remains in repeal and the beat goes on. If this is socialism where do I sign? To many of us on the left including the Occupy Wall Street crowd this looks like party time. For me, the limited actions on Wall Street are more baffling in terms of the Socialist argument than almost anything else. Christ,  his rhetoric was hot, but the actual fix was way too f***ing cool. Thanks to campaign cash, and tax payer bought and paid for lobbyists Wall Street made out like the bandits they are. Congress, buried under a $4 billion pile of cash, folded and Obama barely put up a fight. Perversely, in what we are now told is Socialist America, Citibank and Chase rule the world.

There was a time the Tea Party cared about this, but I guess once it got coopted by big business and the Republican establishment elites, not so much. Too bad, for a few minutes there both the active left and the active right in the US were pretty pissed off at a round of corruption and Government intercession on behalf of the rich and powerful not seen or so well understood for 80 years.

What changed? Power and wealth is concentrated in even fewer hands. Thanks to Citizens United huge chucks of that wealth pour, with few controls or regulation, into extreme and supercharged campaign expenditures, both democratic and republican. It may take a decade but both parties will come to regret the day that a handful of billionaires were allowed to control the national dialogue in this way. A few dozen people have contributed nearly half of the $100 million raised so far. Billions more will be raised in this election cycle. This is not what democracy looks like. This is Potterville.

Progressives despised Bush because he did clearly measureable bad things. On the flipside, as the country meanders through the extreme charges of the current presidential field of Republican candidates what most of us see as it regards the charges against Obama is insanity masked as political dialogue. The sagging poll numbers of the Republicans at the National level, along with the deep disregard for the extreme and elitist, bought and paid for Congress , indicate that the right may eventually get their candidate, but in the general that candidate may garner something just north of 45% which will be disastrous for the GOP at all levels. We can only hope. Can you say so long independents, especially suburban women? You boys are sinking and water to your eyeballs you don’t even know it. Egged on by a wild-eyed conspiratorial Santorum, Romney, trapped by his record of venal line crossing and far from sensing the political breeze, does not adjust. Rather he doubles down as a “severe” conservative. What, pray tell, is that?

But back to Bush…

Progressives despised Bush because he and his inner circle of war criminals, Cheney &  Rumsfeld, entered into two wars, one of which through arrogant hubris wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.  I was angry and fearful like most Americans and thought Afghanistan was unavoidable. Iraq was another matter. Generals who questioned the Iraqi strategy and warned of the results we eventually saw were fired or transferred. The whole go-small thing was a complete military disaster, and what America got, what the Iraqis got, was chaos, failure, and lost human treasure, and that little pr***, Rumsfeld, telling everyone who would listen that “Democracy is messy”. Meanwhile, Bush appointed one civilian leader after another to oversee America’s rebuilding effort. Each failed completely at their appointed job, topped off by Bremmer who without doubt pushed the Sunnis into Civil War and created the real crisis that engulfs Iraq even uo to today. I know after this lengthy piece no one wants to get a history of Iraq, but Bush and his team fouled Iraq up at every level, even after at certain junctures they had opportunities to step back and reassess. Failure is not a strong enough word to convey the Shakespearean majesty of their ineptitude. I could recommend half a dozen books, that tell this sordid history, but those on the hysterical right can’t be bothered with anything not endorsed by Rush, or Sean, or Mark Levin, or O’Reilly… Christ, the list goes on and on. So many people, so little real information, but one thing we can be sure of is this: The US military will not soon enter a war under such poor circumstances.  

I did not support the surge. I thought it would lead to more senseless death. Militarily I was wrong. The surge, allowed the US to retain a hold on a thread of dignity, but it pulled loose from a weeping chasm of defeat. The world knows that the war itself was entered into under a dishonest and rigged intelligence propaganda war that proved in every way to be dishonest. That is no longer conjecture. Powell now calls his appearance at the UN one of the biggest failures of his long career. Everyone knows. Only the Republican right disputes the truth.

On the economy those on the right that project the entire disaster on Obama with no acknowledgement at all of the deep crisis which hit the Bush administration at the end of their jobless, tax cut and spending binge, crisis mystify progressives.  

The point is that progressives hold Bush deeply responsible for the disasters for which he is directly responsible and for those things that happened on his watch. This is not worry for what might be, but anger for what was. Conservatives it seems make a boogeyman of every Obama action, and project death panels and Armageddon for every result which is yet to be seen. I respect those that raise Constitutional concerns about some of these policies, but take them less than seriously when this same crowd argued and argues today that the Patriot Act did not go far enough.

In absence of any rational critique of the president many of us assume that there is deep strain of racism in the opposition to the President. The images of Tea Party rallies filled with white folk carrying either the Confederate flag or racist signs such as, “The Zoo has an African (picture of a lion) and The White House has a Lyin’ African” do little to dispel that notion. A simple google search produces dozens of additional images with monkeys, tribesman, and so forth. Both sides use Nazism sloppily to make their ill-defined case as if anything in our current dialogue could measure up to genocide of six million. Santorum pulled that Nazi s*** just a couple days ago. And before you say it, yes, Bush too was subjected to vile rhetoric too. Protesters often referred to him as a fascist (and a Nazi), but being white race never entered into it.

And here I do not even mean to suggest that Bush was the worst president ever, though short of Hoover, I’m hard pressed to come up with another choice. But to call Obama the worst, or as Tony did yesterday or day before not really even the president. Well, sh**, you’re just wrong. Hold onto that anger though. Get out to that Santorum rally. Let’s hope he nominates Herman Cain for Vice President and announces he’ll name one of the Koch brothers as Secretary of the Treasury, or maybe for HHS, and Trump as Secretary of State. As a commie-socialist-liberal-progressive-race-baiter I’m all in with that. Pulling for you….