stop jameskpolka before he posts again

"The Swamp" is a comment forum/blog from The Chicago Tribune. There's a metric shitload of muy picante reader comments under The Tribune's article ("Bush's Katrina Problem Just Got Bigger") about the Associated Press' disclosure of a White House conference call (which included President Bush at his Crawford, Texas ranch) in which federal weather officials explicitly warned that New Orleans' Mississippi River levees were at immediate risk of breach, and response resources were at immediate risk of being overwhelmed.

Agence-Vleeptron Presse's National Affairs Correspondent, jameskpolka, jumped on the bandwagon. The Tribune reads each comment first to make sure nobody says anything ultra-naughty. (I didn't say anything ultra-naughty, I don't think.) So I don't know if The Tribune will post my comment.

But A-VP has agreed to post my comment. A-VP hopes you enjoy it. Please feel free to Leave A Comment, here, at The Swamp, or in both loci.

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The Bush White House is like a visiting class of high school honor students who sit in all the chairs, use the phones, pose for photos, and pretend to run the country.

But visiting high school students get their certificates and go home at the end of the day.

The Bush administration is with us every day, for eight years.

Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, stretching our military to the snapping point in two wars (while rattling sabers at Syria, Iran and North Korea) -- at this moment, we've lost 2296 American servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq, and shepherded it to the brink of religious civil war in a plan to use superpower military shock and awe to install democracy in a Muslim society in Asia.

If Iraq was secretly about securing oil -- what did you pay at the pump this week? The blood of our soldiers and Marines has shocked the pump price far higher than before the Iraq war.

There has not been so incompetent, ineffective, corrupt, dishonest, unresponsive, unaccountably lawless, and imperial an administration since Nixon's.

And what happened to Nixon and his inner circle is the best thing that could happen now, promptly, to the people of the United States and to the people of the world.

What do American citizens expect, fundamentally and minimally, from the executive branch of the federal government?

Protection of the homeland.

Did we get it before 9/11? Is anyone confident that the new Department of Homeland Security has effectively provided increased protection since 9/11? By the time Katrina struck, FEMA and our federal response to natural disasters had been entrusted to the Department of Homeland Security.

In late February, Americans saw the Secretary of Homeland Security testify that transfering control of six of our largest ports to the government of the United Arab Emirates would in no way compromise homeland port security.

And when the sale was publicized, it came as much of a surprise to President Bush as it was to the American media and people.

The posts on this forum that fend off all criticisms of the Bush administration as partisan attacks by liberals -- that was the defense chorus during Nixon/Vietnam/Watergate. This is beyond liberal vs. conservative, this is beyond Republican vs. Democrat.

All our lives are on the line, and the Bush administration is incompetent to preserve the lives of our soldiers and Marines or make America safer.

Last night, by the administration's best and most recent guess, President Bush slept in the same nation that Osama bin Ladin slept in. Our re-structured, re-focused intelligence directorate should have found him, our superpower military should have captured or killed him.

But both sleepers awoke safe today, breakfasted, and went their separate ways.


Posted by: jameskpolka at Mar 4, 2006 3:47:05 PM