Three Disasters for Bush (DetFP columnist)

[Bozita]

http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/erdz11e_20050911.htm

RON DZWONKOWSKI: Three Disasters for Bush


September 11, 2005


BY RON DZWONKOWSKI
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST


President George W. Bush has said he doesn't read newspapers -- "I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving" -- but he does plunge into history books as his time allows. Unlike some presidents, he is thus not a finger-in-the-wind leader, hypersensitive to criticism and likely to switch directions as fast as he senses a switch in opinion. No, he is a stay-the-course fellow, confident that history will vindicate his choices, even if he's no longer around to read about it.


Maybe he's right. But if historians were doing a quick summary of "the Bush years" today, they could wrap them around three monumental events, all disasters that the Bush administration failed to anticipate. And in each case, the response to calamity came up short.


These "defining disasters" of the Bush years would be the 9/11 terrorist attacks of four years ago today, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. OK, the war itself was a quick success, but the ongoing aftermath has been a bloody mess.


Evidence released through the several investigations into 9/11 makes a convincing case that the Bush White House and the intelligence agencies under its direction never really connected a series of suspicious dots that should have had the nation on red alert well before the color codes were invented.

more...

[flordehinojos]

1. is a stay-the-course fellow, confident that history will vindicate his

choices."

wow! how like FIDEL CASTRO whose phrase HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME became world famous when he pronounced it during his trial after his capture shortly after his attack on the Cuartel Moncada in 1956.

[jbfam4]

2. See more fraud by FEMA just to get votes.

Chief coroner warns of more FEMA waste on funeral overpayments

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/sfl-fema12aug12,0,3244371.story?coll=sfla-news-utility

By Sally Kestin and Megan O'Matz
Staff Writers
Posted August 12 2005

FEMA worker Mary Ann Carlisle left these "sample letters'' with the Medical Examiner in Polk County, hoping to persuade him to link a death to the hurricanes. The letters suggest wording from doctors to allow FEMA to approve funeral claims.

Despite assurances from federal officials that they will change the way they award disaster funeral assistance, taxpayer money will likely still be wasted, Florida's chief medical examiner predicted Thursday.

After last year's hurricanes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid funeral expenses for more than 200 Floridians who died of cancer, AIDS, heart disease and other causes that had nothing to do with the storms, medical examiners found. FEMA announced a new policy last week tightening up some of its procedures but continues to allow family doctors to link deaths to a disaster.

"Nothing's changed," said Dr. Stephen Nelson, head of Florida's Medical Examiners Commission. "We'll be back to many more deaths than what we're counting as hurricane-related."

Meeting on Key Biscayne on Thursday, the commission announced preliminary results of its review of 306 of the 319 deaths resulting in FEMA payments. They found more than 200 cases that were not caused by the storms.As the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Wednesday, FEMA paid cremation expenses for a Charlotte County man who died of liver cirrhosis five months after Hurricane Charley and for a Palm Beach Gardens heart patient who left an estate worth $2 million.