Native Americans Criticize Bush's Silence -- Response to School Shooting

Native Americans Criticize Bush's Silence
Response to School Shooting Is Contrasted With President's Intervention in Schiavo Case
By Ceci Connolly -- Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64317-2005Mar24.html

MINNEAPOLIS, March 24 -- Native Americans across the country -- including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members -- voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.

Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.

"From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn't said or done a thing," said Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian who is the founder and national director of the American Indian Movement here. "When people's children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer his condolences. . . . If this was a white community, I don't think he'd have any problem doing that."

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The reaction to Bush's silence was particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted.

"The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.

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I think this toon says it all -- http://radfringe.tripod.com/id1.html

Make the chimp send the Secret Service to pick him up outside an Indian casino with Neil only wearing a barrel.

Bush wants you in a christian church praying at his feet and old enough to vote.

Besides, soverin's too big a word.

/sarscam off

Probably has a punitive plan to tell us about!!

Summed up in a paragraph.

"The fact that Bush preempted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a member of the North Carolina-based Lumbee tribe.

Yes, Mr. Wilkins, it is very telling.

If you're brown you're not on his radar.

these must be the children who fell through the cracks of Bush's "NCLB" policy. What a jackass! His twisted priorities scare me.