lame duck president abandons a nationConfidence in the Office of the President of the United States of America has plummeted as the encumbent George W. Bush reels from crisis to catastrophe of his own creation.Thousands of victims of hurricane Katrina may have perished over five days while the White House fiddled.
Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard, declaring that "[b]ureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now", cites the case of an emergency worker.
"His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night."
Former editor of The New York Times, Howell Raines, claims that "Bush seems determined to show his successors how to holiday through an apocalypse". "The church-going cultural populism of Bush has given the US an Administration that worries about the house of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die on foreign deserts."
The unpreparedness and inability to save lives after years spent preparing for homeland disaster, made even more incredible by the certainty that a natural disaster had occurred, exposes the Office of President to allegations of criminal incompetence and a callous lack of concern.
The Bush administration's inability to achieve a positive outcome in any enterprise undertaken, from Afghanistan where terrorists are regrouping and redeploying to the debacle in Iraq, the failures of corporate supervision with Enron, Social Security and now Home Security reform, combined with questions over a covert business agenda with the Executive's involvement with Halliburton, mark a watershed in the Office of the President from which the United States and its eminent Constitution will need new direction.
Citizens of the United States deserve more than a pot luck president who may or may not act with integrity in their interests.
The Bush administration has proved over and over again that the power the Constitution vests in the Office of President is too easily abused to be maintained.
An Office of President in the form of an executive of elders presiding over a Congress comprising women's and men's legislatures accompanied by courts of women's and men's jurisdiction would temper the potential for abuse the Bush administration has unwittingly exposed.
September 9, 2005
