Robert Parry: 'Bush, Katrina & Trent Lott's house'

Robert Parry, Consortium News

On his 13th trip to the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast, where hundreds died
and tens of thousands lost everything they had, George W. Bush was still
mourning the loss of Sen. Trent Lott's Mississippi waterfront house.

Hurricane Katrina "was massive in its destruction," Bush told reporters
along for his Aug. 28 visit to the slowly recovering region. "It spared
nobody. United States Senator Trent Lott had a fantastic house overlooking
the bay. I know because I sat in it with he and his wife. And now it's
completely obliterated. There's nothing."

Indeed, perhaps the most revealing glimpse that the Katrina disaster offered
into Bush's inner self was the contrast between his strained attempts at
empathy for the common folks - like a photo-op hug for a couple of
well-scrubbed African-American girls who survived the flood - and his pain
over the destruction of one home owned by a millionaire senator who lives
most of the year in Washington.

Katrina ripped off the pretense of Bush's folksy style, showing that he
remains the son of privilege who feels for those like himself and feigns
sympathy for others. After Katrina hit the Gulf region and inundated New
Orleans one year ago, White House officials even had trouble getting a
vacationing Bush to focus on the magnitude of the disaster.

As tens of thousands of Americans in New Orleans pleaded for rescue and as
hundreds of bodies rotted in the heat, Bush belatedly agreed to cut short
his five-week Texas vacation but still insisted on fulfilling speaking
engagements in San Diego and Phoenix - where he posed clowning with a gift
guitar - before heading back to Washington.

Back at the White House, Bush's staff - knowing their boss' disinterest in
reading newspapers or watching the TV news - tried to clue Bush in on how
bad things were by burning a special DVD with TV footage of the flood so he
could watch the DVD on Air Force One, Newsweek's Evan Thomas reported in a
retrospective on the flood.

"How this could be - how the President of the United States could have even
less 'situational awareness,' as they say in the military, than the average
American about the worse natural disaster in a century - is one of the more
perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of
heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace," Thomas
wrote. [Newsweek, Sept. 18, 2005, issue]

Yet, despite the DVD showing the horrific conditions, Bush still treated his
first trip to the stricken Gulf region on Sept. 2, 2005, as a chance to pat
his disaster team on the back and chat up the locals about how everything
was going to turn out just great.

Bush praised his inept Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael
Brown. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," Bush famously remarked, just
days before Brown was relieved of command and resigned from FEMA.

Bush also consoled Sen. Lott, who had lost one of his homes to the flood.
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house -
there's going to be a fantastic house," Bush joshed. "And I'm looking
forward to sitting on the porch."

Even as he was departing, Bush still wasn't connecting to the magnitude of
the horror. At a press briefing before boarding Air Force One, Bush recalled
his past hard partying in New Orleans, which he called "the town where I
used to come ... to enjoy myself, occasionally too much."

Later that night on a TV fundraiser for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye West
summed up the President's behavior with the memorable line: "George Bush
doesn't care about black people." The remark sent NBC executives into a
panic that led to them censoring West's comment from the show's rebroadcast
in the Pacific time zone.

More Compassion

But many Americans appeared to have agreed with Kanye West. Bush's approval
ratings dropped to record lows, prompting Bush to revise his approach to the
crisis. He ordered up more trips to the region, posed with more
African-Americans and vowed a vast rebuilding project on par with what he
has promised for Iraq.

On Sept. 15, 2005, Bush gave a nationally televised speech in shirt sleeves
in New Orleans' Jackson Square with special generators and lighting flown in
to give the President a dramatic backdrop.

"We will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes," Bush declared
in phrasing reminiscent of his pledges about Iraq.

But his poll numbers continued to fall and he returned to the scene again to
demonstrate more concern and more compassion. "We look forward to hearing
your vision so we can more better do our job," Bush said at a briefing in
Gulfport, Miss.

As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed, "There's nothing more
pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch."

Though Dowd believed that Bush was echoing his father's pretense of empathy
as in his dad's famous comment, "Message: I care," the President may have
been revealing how much he is like his mother, Barbara, who visited flood
survivors at the Houston Astrodome and commented, "what I'm hearing which is
sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas."

The former First Lady then added, "So many of the people in the arena here,
you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - this (she chuckles) is
working very well for them."

One year later, George W. Bush is still trying to put the best possible spin
on the slow pace of the region's recovery.

"There will be a momentum; a momentum will be gathered," he explained to
reporters. "Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses."

But no house seems to grab the President's attention the way that Trent
Lott's does.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of
the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999
book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Source: Consortium News
http://consortiumnews.com/2006/082906.html

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson