Failed Leadership - Impeach Bush/Cheney

Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly finds a lots of people who are confused as to why it took the Bush Gang so long to get help to the Gulf Coast.

"DITHERING DURING THE FLOOD....One of the mysteries of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is why George Bush and his aides dithered so long about sending active duty military troops to New Orleans... This dithering apparently lasted for at least two days — and possibly three or four — at the height of the crisis."

Kevin quotes extensively from a Knight Ridder article published yesterday.

"Two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, President Bush went on national television to announce a massive federal rescue and relief effort.

But orders to move didn't reach key active military units for another three days.

... "If the 1st Cav and 82nd Airborne had gotten there on time, I think we would have saved some lives," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Reagan from 1985 to 1989. "We recognized we had to get people out, and they had helicopters to do that."

The military has consistently and effectively been used in support of civilian authorities in national emergencies and in disaster situations. The simple fact is that the Bush Administration doesn't have any interest in how the government works or what it can do to help people. President Bush is an ignorant, hands-off, "manager" who doesn't know the first thing about his job. He is surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear and, apparently just make shit up to keep him from chewing them out.

So....while people are dying and in a situation where Bush's action could make a difference he waits for his incompetent political cronies to decide what to do.

"Addressing the nation on Thursday night in a speech from New Orleans, Bush said the storm overwhelmed the disaster relief system. "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces, the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice," he said.

Several emergency response experts, however, questioned whether Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff understood how much authority they had to tap all the resources of the federal government - including those of the Department of Defense.

"To say I've suddenly discovered the military needs to be involved is like saying wheels should be round instead of square," said Michael Greenberger, a law professor and the director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security."

Five years after 911 and everything has changed. We now have a government in place that is incapable of responding to a crisis. Five years after 911, we have government structures in place that are so bound up in bureaucracy and procedural red tape, that they don't even have time to read their own emergency plans. Five years after 911, when a disaster strikes the leaders of our country haven't got a clue as to how they should respond.

"They're trying to say that greater federal authority would have made a difference," said George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff and the co-author of a textbook on emergency management. "The reality is that the feds are the ones that screwed up in the first place. It's not about authority. It's about leadership. ... They've got all the authority already."

George Bush is the "screw up in chief". Why does he still have a job?