Yowch!

From an unsigned Washington Post editorial:

President Bush, who has maintained his weeks-long holiday schedule without regard to the bloodshed in Iraq, is breaking off his summer idyll two days early to tend to the fallout from Katrina.

Who says the mainstream media can't bury the rapier when it really wants to? Trouble is, it so very rarely wants to...

Update, 9/1/05: And now it's the New York Times piling on:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday... He...read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration... [...]

It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.

All well-and-good. But has the Times ever, even once issued an editorial edict such as the following concerning the equally dire humanitarian situation in Iraq?

Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi.

With Judy Miller holed up in the stoney lonesome, the path is presumably clear for it to do so.

The absence of any comparisons to the man-made, intentional, triumphalist destruction of Iraq is especially striking given the frequent references to the Gulf Coast as resembling a war zone. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour compared the damage to Hiroshima; while a Texas professor wondered, incredibly, "What do you compare it to? Dresden? Berlin?"

Uh, how about Fallujah; where the existence of a single building in a given city block is cited as evidence that "destruction is not total"; where hundreds of thousands of refugees spent the winter in camps outside of the city; where -- as opposed to New Orleans, where at least the hospitals have stayed operating as long as possible -- the hospitals were the first buildings destroyed? How about Baghdad, whose residents are suffering through the third year of intermittent-at-best electricity, and where the "coalition" fired off god-knows-how-many tons of Depleted Uranium?

The comparisons between the Gulf Coast and Iraq are so obvious, it would seem impossible to miss them. Yet just two days after crowing about "universal values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law", with regards to Iraq; the President lamented "one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history" -- and not a damn person called him out over the hypocrisy.

Posted by Eddie Tews at August 30, 2005 10:26 PM