With the anniversary of the countries most devastating natural disaster of our lifetime just behind us, there has been plenty of news and commentary about post Katrina New Orleans. Four years ago the we watched the devastation unfold, safe and dry in our midwestern living rooms. Most of us made some fairly harsh judgements from our easy chairs. We listened to New Orleans Mayor, Ray race card Nagin, complain that the feds weren't doing enough, while he did just as little. We watched as the man who ran FEMA left people to fend for themselves. We saw people lying dead on sidewalks, bloated and fly blown, bobbing in fetid waters, old and young, the most vulnerable left to fend for themselves. We saw the worst of people. Cops caught on camera shopping, along with the rest of the looters. People who we wanted to pity, until we saw them packing big screen televisions through broken store windows.
Red tape and multiple government dick measuring, Nagin sat on buses instead of evacuating the people he was charged to protect. A FEMA director whose previous job experience was judging horse shows, smiling beside Bush while that famous line spilled from the Moron in Chiefs mouth, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job", or words to that effect. We can deploy an entire Battalion of Marines to foreign soil in under 48 hours, but we couldn't get food and water to people in our own country for 5 days. In my opinion, the way the Bush administration handled Katrina was the biggest failure and dereliction of duty in the eight years that Bush ran this country.
Trust me when I say, I was one of the first to blame those who stayed after being told to leave. I still believe more people could have left, could have survived, had they heeded the warnings. I still believe they shared as much if not more responsibility for their hardship those first weeks. But that's really missing the point. For every idiot who stayed behind by choice, there were children who paid for the decision they had no hand in making. Nagin blamed the feds, the feds blamed the Governor and Nagin, cover your ass was the theme of the day. So four years later, for most of us, Katrina is a distant memory. Most of us have moved on, put those eight years of the Bush administration behind us. Liberals aren't calling for heads over the New Orleans debacle. Which brings me to the real subject of this post.
Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. opened an investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law, and the Obama administration complied with a judge's order and released a long-secret CIA report that cataloged allegations of agency prisoner abuse. Out of all of the Bush administrations many sins, the one that seems to have people up in arms the most, are the tactics we used to get information from suspected terrorists. Human rights groups, liberals with an agenda, and a grudge, a current administration with too much on its plate already, journalists, and bloggers. They started with the military, moved to the CIA, and we all know where that road leads, Bush and Cheney. That's what this investigation is really about, breaking it off in Bush and Cheney. It's not about justice. If justice was foremost in the mind of the current administration, there would be investigations focusing on why Americans were allowed to suffer during Katrina. Nagin would be out of work, Brownie would be in jail, Bush would be busy issuing apologies. Instead we focus on the supposed rough treatment of people who would love to see our children's heads on a pike. We wring our hands over empty threats made to kill some guy in Afghanistan's mother, we rise up in self righteous indignation over pouring water in the face of a religious zealot, we hang our heads in shame because " this isn't how Americans treat their enemies". We are going to hang onto this investigation like a pit bull, we won't let go until we taste blood.
I'm watching Cheney on Fox news as I write this. He is giving a multitude of reasons why the investigation is a bad thing. Of course his biggest concern is his own ass, and politics. Make no mistake, Cheney in my opinion is the second biggest douche bag to come down the pike, Bush being the first. Carter running a not too distant third. Back to my point, I find it more than a little telling that a section of society is so wrapped up in "Getting those Guys". It doesn't smell like justice, it doesn't feel like they just want to get to the truth, it seems more like a lynch mob atmosphere. There is no doubt that Cheney and Bush made a lot of really shitty moves, they dropped the ball with more regularity than a Chiefs running back. Given that, you'll be hard pressed to convince me that CIA tactics are their biggest sin.
Today, right now, we have almost 10 percent unemployment, people who can't afford to be sick, a local murder rate that will probably be a record setter, we have plenty of problems. Why take any focus off of the major issues that plague this country with a witch hunt? If we are so concerned about the tacit violation of Human Rights , why put all of this focus on a hand full of incidents involving our known enemies, while ignoring the major human rights violations that took place during Katrina? It appears that a few brown skinned people on a different continent are more important than the brown skinned folks in New Orleans. Maybe I'm reaching here, but that's certainly how it seems on the surface. Which was a greater violation of Human rights, the way we dealt with potential terrorists, or the way we failed our own people, especially the most helpless, the elderly, infirm, and young? You tell me. I smell something, but it ain't justice.
