Hurricane

The Hurricane and the President
By Daniel G. Jennings
The media has already decided that the chaos, confusion and misery caused by the government’s inability to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is all President Bush’s fault. Commentators like NBC blabbermouth Tim Russert are saying it’s all Bush’s fault.
What we are seeing in Louisiana and Mississippi is a catastrophic systems failure, the entire system of government and emergency relief seems to have broken down. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, no one man not even the President can be blamed for that.
The story on the Gulf Coast is the inability of all levels of our government, state, local and federal to deal with the disaster. Law enforcement, the military, emergency services, social services, and political administration have all failed and failed miserably.
Yet that’s not the way the media seems to see it they are engaging in a game of blame Mr. Bush. Average people are wondering why the media is spending its time smearing the president in a time of national crisis.
There are many reasons why the media is doing this. For one it simplifies the story the media likes simple stories good guys vs. bad guys. Creating a villain to blame also puts a human face on the story and makes it more melodramatic. It provides conflict and gist for the armies of political commentators on the networks’ payrolls.
It also helps the media cover up what amounts to a complete failure on the part of our classes of political leadership. Politicians of both parties failed to plan for this catastrophe or to create the mechanisms needed to deal with it. The media failed to expose the shortcomings of the system or investigate the lack of preparedness. Commentators failed to talk about this, instead they blabbered on about Cindy Sheahan and other artificial stories.
The catastrophe on the Gulf Coast exposes what amounts to a complete breakdown of our political system and its inability to meet even the basic needs of citizens. This is a disaster on the magnitude of the Great Depression or Pearl Harbor and our so called leaders don’t know how to react to it.
Worse even if they wanted to respond to the disaster the system may not let them do so. It’s obvious that traditional means of disaster response are not going to work here. New means are needed as are serious discussions of the problems involved.
Unfortunately that’s not what we’re going to get from either the media or our political leaders. Instead we’ll get a round of blame Bush and conservatives circling the wagon and defending the White House. Even if a politician wanted to engage in serious talk the media mavens would quickly redirect the conversation to bash Bush.
How many disasters will our great nation have to endure and how many innocent people will have to suffer before we wake up and realize that the whole system is broken. Then maybe we can start working to fix it rather than trying to destroy each other.