George Bush, The Man

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  • dvs
    Gold Gabber
    • Jun 2004
    • 561

    George Bush, The Man

    at least someone in Canada has a brain...


    George Bush, The Man.

    By David Warren The Ottawa Citizen Sunday, September 11, 2005.

    There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I'm tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

    But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live.

    And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

    We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

    From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

    This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and government support through many other programs. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses that could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.

    Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

    The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote Republican. For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets."

    The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.

    Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.

    Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days in advance of the stormfall. In the little time since, he has managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.

    One thinks of Kipling's poem If, which I learned to recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:

    If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise,..... And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

    Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.
    "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

    "the progressive sound will not come back because it's already here; you just need to search for it." - Mo Shic
  • Civic_Zen
    Platinum Poster
    • Jun 2004
    • 1116

    #2
    Re: George Bush, The Man

    It still amazes me to come into MS and see this sort of thing. I opened this thread thinking, no knowing that it was going to bash Bush. I was wrong.

    The article has many good points, and coming from a Canadian makes it even more suprising.

    I was waiting for Rita to hit Texas and have Bush condemned. Since the Governor of Texas is 10x smarter then the Governor of Louisiana, and actually got things together in preperation of the hurricane. I figured it would hit, Texas would get instant action, and everyone would say "Its because Bush was from Texas and was giving preferential treatment." I can pretty much guarentee thats how it would have went down had it hit and been on the scale people were saying.
    "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." - Tacitus (55-117 A.D.)
    "That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."
    - Thomas Jefferson

    Comment

    • dvs
      Gold Gabber
      • Jun 2004
      • 561

      #3
      Re: George Bush, The Man

      Originally posted by Civic_Zen
      I figured it would hit, Texas would get instant action, and everyone would say "Its because Bush was from Texas and was giving preferential treatment." I can pretty much guarentee thats how it would have went down had it hit and been on the scale people were saying.
      that is the first thing we said at work the day they had rita hitting texas....
      "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

      "the progressive sound will not come back because it's already here; you just need to search for it." - Mo Shic

      Comment

      • Yao
        DUDERZ get a life!!!
        • Jun 2004
        • 8167

        #4
        Re: George Bush, The Man

        Ah great, Black & White opinions, gotta love 'em....
        Blowkick visual & graphic design - No Civilization. Now With Broadband.

        There are but three true sports -- bullfighting, mountain climbing, and motor-racing. The rest are merely games. -Hemingway

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