"Here's what gets me": great essay on ThisIsNotOver.com

[ProfessorPlum]

On Bush's reaction

<snip>

I want him to have reacted like a person who happened to also be the president. I want him to have felt the same bone-deep sense of shock that I felt at the thought that this could happen in a large city, easily accessible by trucks, in a wealthy country. I want him to have gotten on the damn phone and told somebody that if there wasn't water for every person at the Superdome within eight hours, that person's head was going to roll, and he didn't care how it got done, it had better get done. I want him not to have sat around on his ass on vacation while people's children were being taken from their arms to be rescued.

I want Bush not to have spent four days dicking around while the conditions deteriorated. I want him to have acted sooner, not because it was his obligation as president and it would reflect badly on him if he didn't, but because people were dying, and everyone I know who could think of something to do did it. There were a million things he could have done besides sit around making happy speeches about how everything would be fine. The stupid comment about Trent Lott's porch doesn't infuriate me because Trent Lott can't miss his porch. He has as much right to be sad over his losses as anyone. But the lighthearted way in which Bush delivered those remarks was absolutely chilling.

I want him to have been consumed with grief and sorrow at the dying that was ongoing, and he wasn't. I want him to have felt like a profound failure because an entire segment of the population of one of America's greatest cities was suffering and was at risk of starving to death, but he didn't. I want him to have been embarrassed when the FEMA director gave up the information that FEMA knew less about the convention center than CNN, but he wasn't. I want him not to have smirked his way through the entire experience, and he did.

No matter whose fault the slow relief effort was, the fact of the matter is that these are Americans, and this is their president, and the fact that they were homeless, starving, dying of thirst, and deprived of medication never once seemed to actually bother him.

</snip>

Go read the whole thing at http://www.thisisnotover.com/archives/2005/09/heres_what_gets.html

Sorry if this is a duplicate.

[carpediem]

1. that is awesome and exactly right

we would like to believe our president is human even if we know he isn't.