THE BORE
General => The Superdeep Borehole => Topic started by: Mandark on May 18, 2009, 03:17:31 AM
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http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret
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in b4 "lol GQ" post
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This is the first time in a long time that politics has made me viscerally angry. Then I ate a sandwich and now I'm more depressed than anything.
Still, what the hell?
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A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”
“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”
The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.”
Wow...no words
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The real downer is that large chunks of America wouldn't find this ridiculous.
edit: I mean the Crusader powerpoint shit, not the actual article's contents.
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War, Christianity and Republican malfeasance ... all mixed together?
Oh my god, my liberal dick is SO HARD.
::jacks off furiously::
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Now that's scary
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Saw this last night....still don't know what to make of it.
So damn weird.
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With Rumsfield's bible beating history, is it any surprise he didn't mobilize forces to help people in "Sin City". I'm sure it was some sort of "cleansing" to him. :yuck
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I like Doug's take over at Balloon Juice:
But it looks like what happened was that the Secretary of Defense bullied a weak-minded president with Biblical quotations while the vice-president was trying to torture people into saying there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Sounds about right.
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Fran Townsend, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism during Hurricane Rita:
Later in the evening, her phone rang. It was Chief of Staff Andy Card. “Rumsfeld just called,” said Card. “What is it you need?”
Livid, Townsend said, “I want to know if the president knows what a fucking asshole Don Rumsfeld is.”
:rofl
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Bush sort of was like a 21st century Andrew Johnson. Got most of his support due to a national tragedy, and then causes both parties and the entire country to dislike him.
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Well, just read the article (http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_9217) that goes with it.
It's a good read, but a lot of the sources seem to be trying to exculpate Bush with their stories. "If it weren't for Rumsfeld, we could have gotten a hold on Katrina and Iraq," yadda yadda.
Not surprising. Rumsfeld's been taking flak from the right (http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004228.html) and from the Beltway center (http://www.slate.com/id/2150953/) for years now, and his (rather than Bush's) responsibility for the admin's failures has been a running theme in these pieces.
I'm sure Rumsfeld sucks, but that's no reason to let his boss off the hook.
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The Beltway Club mentality is soooooo disgusting to me. David Broder writing about Bill Clinton, saying "It's not HIS town", the dumb as sin groupthink that says that just because one side says something, it's worth listening to...
That might honestly be what does Obama in.
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Broder/Woodward style journalism is about telling the stories of the people in power. It can be interesting and useful to read insider accounts (as long as you keep in mind the sources' agenda (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/01/bob-woodwards-oeuvre.html)) but it's a narrow view of politics.
They miss the point that these decisions actually matter, not to those who made them but to those feeling the effects. I'm sure it's fun to write character sketches about the movers and shakers and spin narratives about bureaucratic maneuvering, but the people who really suffer when things go wrong are missing from these stories.
Journalists are free to treat national politics as entertainment if they want. But they can't turn around and demand deference from the rest of us.
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The thing that especially annoys me about Broder is that the only way something can be good or legitimate in his eyes is if it's bi-partisan, and by bi-partisan of course he's referring to the Beltway Mentality of "the democrats caving in on everything". That and he's old, and probably smells like moth balls.
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Or just the fact that Pelosi might have known about Bush/Cheney's warcrimes in some way is somehow a juicier story than the actual warcrimes themselves, or that people were being tortured into making false confessions to support a false war (!!!)
With Newt-fucking-Gingrich leading the charge (on CNN's frontpage "Gingrich: Pelosi could be ousted if she lied") the mind-boggles.
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That's Newt "reprimanded by the House Ethics committee, had to resign the Speakership in disgrace" Gingrich to you, mister.
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ah, so he has some experience with this sort of thing
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The thing that especially annoys me about Broder is that the only way something can be good or legitimate in his eyes is if it's bi-partisan, and by bi-partisan of course he's referring to the Beltway Mentality of "the democrats caving in on everything". That and he's old, and probably smells like moth balls.
It's a symptom of seeing politics only through the lens of DC power players. He doesn't care about the results of a policy, just about the process that creates it.
Suggesting a bipartisan commission of elder statesmen is basically saying "I have no opinion at all on what should be done, but if we get a bunch of old, well-connected white guys together with no regard for technical expertise, and let them make the decisions, I'm sure everything will work out fine."
It's passing the buck followed by self-congratulation for being so serious.