NYT: WAITING FOR A LEADER

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01thu1.html

Waiting for a Leader
Published: September 1, 2005

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. 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. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

*snip*

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.

n/t

but then, what did the NYT expect from piss poor "leadership"?

:eyes:

a free pass in 2000, while they slandered, demeaned and trashed our best and brightest and enabled the corrupt/incompetent ones to power to begin with now think he gives a bad speech. The corpwhorate MSM out to be tried for treason along with the neocons for what they have done to the American People. It's too bad only one of them is in jail, keep your fingers crossed.

I'm pretty sure that's what I was hearing from guitar-boy

carnage went on around him might finally be his undoing.

spoke disdainfully of the guitar picture. He neglected to mention the cake picture, though.

that is all. He never really has been the leader of the country. He is a front man, someone they thought they could get elected so the people really in charge can ram their agenda through.

He knows nothing, sees nothing and does nothing.

will come out tomorrow to try to convince everyone that he actually does care.
I would just like some sign from him that he's human and has some feelings. Nothing. No emotion. He is dead inside. I see it in his eyes. Nothing.

but then again, it is the left-wing loonie Times!

and a lot more than a dollar short.

is like driving a car that's running on empty and set to cruise control.

Wow, using that standard, that's pretty low.

I saw part of that speech yesterday and was SHOCKED by how inappropriate it seemed.

I think he even spewed some BS about how New Orleans will "soon again be the shining American city that we've always known it to be".