Recycling Ineffective Rhetoric
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The Bush administration has run out of ideas. Sydney Blumenthal spells out why the White House has ceased mobilizing voters.
A Pattern of Calamity: 9/11, Katrina and Iraq
openDemocracy.net
September 6th, 2006
President Bush declared a national day of remembrance on 29 August, the day of Hurricane Katrina's landfall - not on 2 September, the day the federal government finally responded to the disaster. He has begun commemorating highlights of his presidency as though he were a guide leading visitors through the wonders of the George W Bush presidential library. His dissociation is one element in the continuity of his methods.
The population of New Orleans is about half of the 455,000 it was when the storm hit, reduced to the size it was in 1880. Here the Bush administration has built a bridge to the 19th century. Along the Mississippi coast, fewer than 5% of the wrecked homes are being rebuilt. The $17 billion in federal community-development block grants has only now slowly begun trickling in. Little of it will go to low-income homeowners and none to renters, who constitute about half of those displaced.
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