Project Katrina

For all the anger I have with a lot of our elected leaders, it’s nothing compared to my utter contempt for John McCain (R-AZ). I don’t know if he’s been a millionaire living inside a bubble for so long inside the Beltway that it makes him completely fucking tone deaf to the experiences of others or if he’s just a world class dick, but it takes a superhuman level of gall for him to go to NOLA, which hasn’t even come close to full recovered and say this:

The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again. I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas. Like others before him, he seems to think government is the answer to every problem; that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us. That type of change doesn’t trust Americans to know what is right or what is in their own best interests. It’s the attitude of politicians who are sure of themselves but have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people. That attitude created the unresponsive bureaucracies of big government in the first place. And that’s not change we can believe in.

Dude, you may be old as dirt and have decades of DC experience, but that is what makes this statement all the more amazing. You voted for bill after bill, decade after decade while you were in Congress that underfunded the levees. Did not listen to report after report about the potential problems. Why in the world would we think you’d all the sudden “get it” if you are President?

Since he is going to use NOLA as a political prop, lets us not forget where he was and what he was doing the morning of August 29, 2005 as the citizens of that city drowned.

Greg Anrig over at TMPCafe takes McCain (R-AZ) apart:

While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government’s response to the Katrina disaster “terrible and disgraceful” and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: “Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse.” McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn’t even locate its own assets or people.

The Associated Press reports while McCain (R-AZ) was in New Orleans today he said:

John McCain tured still hurricane-damaged areas of New Orleans and declared that if the disaster had happened on his watch, he would have immediately landed his plane at the nearest Air Force base.

Let us not forget that the above picture of John McCain with Bush, was taken the morning of the day New Orleans was drowning. Can’t you just sense the urgency in McCain suggesting Bush get to NOLA as soon as possible.

According to CBS News:

McCain says making FEMA an independent agency isn’t the problem. He said there needed to qualified people in the job. “The former head of FEMA was not qualified,” he said. “They haven’t always had a terrible record.”

He also told reporters he was not sure if he would rebuild the lower 9th ward as president.

“That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do-rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is,” he said.

Ponder what he means by this and why there were no more follow-up questions. Ask yourself if he’d say something like this if the 9th Ward was middle-class, white, and Republican.

Via the Times-Picayune’s farewell interview with Recovery Czar Donald Powell’s :

But none of the three U.S. senators still running for president showed much of an interest in working with him, he said. Powell recalled talking with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., a couple of times about recovery issues, but said he spoke with former President Clinton more often because of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. Powell said he didn’t recall talking to the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, nor to Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, although his staff dealt with Obama when he accompanied Lieberman on a tour of New Orleans in early 2007.

Now Powell has been a complete failure so I don’t put a lot of worth behind anything he has to say. But ask yourself can any of you recall McCain (R_AZ), Clinton (D-NY) or Obama (D-IL) saying anything about their plans to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I didn’t think so. I should also note that George W. Bush has not appointed anybody to replace Powell.