Disasters of Biblical Proportions

There's a new, illuminating article about Donald Rumsfeld in GQ, detailing his apparent zealous, cynical, manipulative, and ultimately deadly approach to the War in Iraq (most adjectives here helpfully inspired by Frank Rich).  What's especially troubling, besides the religiously tinged war imagery that Rumsfeld submitted to Bush every morning to maintain Dubya's resolute faith in the righteousness of our Iraq mission, is the unsurprising toll Rumsfeld's actions took on our nation at home - in addition to the number of servicemen and women's lives lost.

Basically, Rumsfeld delayed much needed troops on the ground for five days following Katrina, despite even Bush's outrage and embarrassment that our citizens were fighting for their lives in what looked like a "Third World" nation.

The most Marxist, protest-oriented activists in New Orleans fighting the demolition of public housing frequently linked it to the War in Iraq, our dependence on foreign oil, Bush's imperialist Presidency, etc. etc.  Hyperbolic language from a rag-tag, group of loud, angry white hippies - so easily dismissed by most of us due to their disruptive tactics, disorderly comportment, and distasteful anger.

But, sadly, so many of their claims are true.  Despite repeated warnings, years in advance, the Bush Administration was completely caught off guard by Hurricane Katrina and its prolonged devastation across the Gulf Coast.  It had defunded FEMA, shoved it aside in the clusterf&ck agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and installed a woefully imcompetent crony at its head.  It didn't know what the hell to do about legions of poor, black New Orleanians suffering; such vivid and real imagery was at complete odds with their passionate conviction of the righteousness of the U.S. as the world's fit and democratic and free and equal global, white leader - a colonialist aftermath on our own soil didn't square with the narrative that drove us to invade Iraq in the first place.

Stories like the one in GQ provide the missing details for what so many of us believe - that the actions and decisions of our government, at every level but led by the feds - are what drowned an American city and killed more than 1,500 people across the Gulf Coast, a Katrina-soaked landmass the size of Britain.

It's no wonder poverty, mental illness and suicide are on the rise in New Orleans.

(Photo of Rumsfeld by Cody McComas; photo of Rumsfeld protester by shmooth)