September 30, 2005

I'll return on October 12.

Tom Delay

Delay claims that that he is the victim of a political witch-hunt by a partisan prosecutor. I don't know if that's true, but I do know how grand juries work and they have to have enough evidence to justify a trial. I can understand why Mr. Delay would be so outraged; Republicans would never dig up dirt about anyone and use the law to play partisan politics. Wow! I almost wrote that with a straight face.

Brownie

Well, it seems that Brownie thinks that he was doing a heckuva job too.

The leaders that we deserve...

Would someone please explain to me why it seems to be instinctive for the Right to deny all damage to the environment and to rail against any anti-war movement. In their minds can this planet take every single thing that we humans dish out and was there never a war that was not a good idea?

What I’m going to say applies to the Left as well. When every stance that you take is based on the party line, you lose all credibility. You’ve lost the ability to think critically and to make honest judgments; you've lost your integrity. When we think like this we get the leaders that we deserve.

Hurricanes and New Orleans - 5 Years Ago

A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving.

This appeared 5 years ago in Time Magazine. And the surprise was...?

Incompetence or Indifference?

Many Democrats would like to lay all the blame for the Katrina aftermath at Bush's feet. Many Republicans want to defend all his actions and pin the blame on the Democratic Governor of Louisiana and Mayor of New Orleans and possibly FEMA. As I've written before, there's enough blame to go around from bottom to top. However, what disturbs me is the indifference and detachment shown by the President and his circle in the initial days of the blossoming disaster. All they had to do was watch television, any channel, and they would have had a better sense of what was taking place in New Orleans. They showed interest only when public outrage forced them to. Frankly, I don't think enough was made out of the Brownie-you're-doing-a-heck-of-a-job comment. It demonstrates more than anything the good-old-boy mentality and just how unfocused our country's leader really is.

Bill Frist

Bill Frist, can you say Martha Stewart?

Clinton's Response to Terrorism

The Republicans and the Right in general like to talk about what they think of as Clinton's less than stellar repsonse to the U.S.S. Cole and the failed (to a degree) bombing of the WTC. If his actions following these attacks was inadequate in light of what we knew, where was the outcry from all the political pundits at the time? I don't remember anything; in fact, I remember more being said when George senior didn't follow Saddam's army back to Baghdad.

Political Capital

I hope that Bush has spent all the political capital that he thought that he had earned last November. Offhand, at this point I'd say that he's in the hole.

John Ellis Bush: Patriot

I think after John Bush, Governor Jeb's son, explains that he had just come from a night of toasting our troops in Iraq this won't look so bad. I mean, how else could this young, intelligent, physically fit young man support this Bush family value?

Tyco Execs Sentencing

The most delicious part of the Kozlowski and Swartz sentencing is the restitution and fines. I don't think that anything affects people like this except money. My only hope is that their payout reduces them to level of us common folk.

Another Katrina Legacy

Another sad legacy that Katrina will leave us is that at the end of his term Bush will have another excuse as to why our economy is in shambles and will be so for at least another generation. Will he and his "base" suffer because of it? What do you think?

Our Weakness Exposed

We've come a long way from, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." I have a cousin who lives in NYC and she watched the towers fall; that had to have a profoundly long-lasting impact on the psyche. Because of that she has suspended all her other beliefs and voted to put Bush in office for another term because she felt that he was the one who would keep her safe. I think that we were supposed to believe that we learned of our weaknesses through 9/11. I don't know if any president would have done a better job in this disaster, but i think that it's safe to say that none could have done worse.

John Roberts

The reality that the Democrats have to face and accept is that whether they like it or not a Republican president is going to appoint 2 Supreme Court judges. John Roberts appears to be a nominee that could appeal to both parties. Sure the Dems are doing their duty by trying to find out what kind of a Chief Justice he will make, but if they use the occasion for political posturing they will come out the losers. If one can judge from Roberts's opening remarks and later responses he was a good choice. Unlike Bolton, they could do a lot worse.

Taking Responsibility

In this case, Bush is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, but he's finally admitting to something that 61% of the country already knew: the aftermath of Katrina was a bigger disaster than the storm itself. I feel sorry for the 39% who continue to think that he's doing a good job; it must be tough coming up with excuses.

Kanye West's Disgusting Remark

Instead of simply calling Kanye West's comments disgusting, why didn't Laura Bush point out how George has helped poor Black Americans in this country (poverty rate up 17%) and how he has met with the NAACP to shore up relations (it never happened twice). The only thing that Republicans want from poor minorities is their vote.

Firms with Bush ties sang Katrina deals

I know that someone has to profit from the rebuilding of New Orleans, but has this administration no shame? The only Americans that will be better off after 8 years of this presidency will be Bush's and Cheney's cronies. They're in office until 2008 so they don't even care how it looks to the public. If you ask me, Bush's all-time-low approval rating of 38 percent is way too high.

What Went Right

I think that Bush's investigation is going to turn up a short list of things that went right. That said, I'm glad that some folks are now thinking of the abandoned pets. Of course, people have to come first, but it's been heartbreaking to hear some of the stories from pet owners.

The Blame Game

It seems to me that the people who don't want to play the Blame Game are usually the ones being blamed. By the way, it's not a game. Though senior Bush officials have said that the State of Louisiana did not ask for assistance until Wednesday, September 31, the truth is that they did so on August 28.

Barbara Bush shows her humanity

At first I thought that what I heard couldn't be true. Surely Barbara Bush, regardless of her true feelings, would not be stupid enough to say on the air that "... so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this is working very well for them." Surely she would not say "What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas." But, she did; I heard the audio.

Apparently, she believes so deeply that the underprivileged do not have the same desire for stability, do not mourn the loss of their loved ones, do not experience fear, do not have the same need for safety, privacy, sanitation and dignity as the privileged that she was able to say this with complete candor and innocence. Though I wasn't a big fan of George H., I'm beginning to believe that he is the only honorable person in the family.

Bush's Investigation

Without putting blame on anyone, it seems that when the President says that he will lead an investigation “to find out what went right and what went wrong,” that he has taken himself out of the mix. It may wash with all the folks who believe that he can do no wrong but it won't silence people who want real answers.

Misery everywhere...

A friend who lives in Venezuela writes that while he is saddened and deeply touched by the tragic news coming out of New Orleans, especially the children and elderly, he says that this sort of thing is part of daily life in his country but the poor do not always cry out. It helped put things in a disturbing perspective for me.

Criticism of Government Response a Good Thing?

Has anyone thought that the criticism of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation, or any other criticism, is a good thing? Has it not stepped up the pace? Has it not made people more mindful of what their responsibilities are? On our jobs, when we know we're being evaluated on our performance, does it not cause us to examine our actions? During this tragedy I've seen many messengers shot and vilified because they dared to criticize. I think that people forget that speaking out against our government when we believe that it's wrong is one of the things that we say that we stand for.

Things that you don't do just because they don't look right...

I understand the President of the United States can run the country from anywhere, but there are somethings that just don't look right. Here's one of them from http://bellaciao.org:

"President Bush was on holiday in Texas when Katrina struck. He then
spent Monday on a pre-arranged political fundraising tour of California
and Arizona, which he did not cancel or curtail. On Tuesday he surveyed
the hurricane damage - but only from the flight deck of Air Force One,
prompting criticism that he was too detached from the suffering on the
ground. He didn’t give a speech until Tuesday afternoon - 36 hours
after the storm first hit - and didn’t embark on a proper tour of the
region until yesterday. Key advisers have come under fire for similar
levels of detachment. As the full magnitude of the disaster unfolded,
the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was seen buying shoes in New
York, and Dick Cheney remained on holiday."

It sort of makes the agonizingly long 5 minutes of My Pet Goat seem rather puny.

± Last Updated: 09-03-2005 10:02 P GMT-06 ::

Read Michael Moore's open letter to Bush

Fair criticism? I honestly still don't know what to think. I do know that there's plenty of blame to go round, starting in New Orleans and ending in Washington, D.C. It wasn't too long after Katrina left the west coast of Florida that a local weather forecaster said that this would be a disaster that make 9/11 pale in comparison. I've heard and read about the potential for this to happen for years, so none of this should taken anyone by surprise. - Amiko

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

Hurricane Katrina

It's almost incomprehensible how such an oasis of disaster can exist in a place that, for many, is only a few hours away, either by car or plane. Not to politicize this, but there seems to be a widening gap between what is being said is being done and what is actually being done. I don't think that any administration would purposely let so so many people suffer, so I don't understand the seeming ineptitude of our government's response.