The Ultimate Insult: Bush Visits The Gulf Coast

Bush Visits Gulf Coast, Stressing Progress

I cannot help but think that Bush visiting the Gulf Coast one year after Katrina and Rita devastated is insulting, crude, crass and the ultimate of denial of responsibility for making the disaster multiple times worse than it should have been.

I refer my readers to my post on "Katrina Realities" which calls the failures of our government to task.

Now, for the sake of a "photo op," Bush is visiting the regions hardest hit by Katrina and Rita, as well as the lack of adequate and competent response from all levels of government.

Of course, in typical fashion, only looks at the positive... and continues to deny the realities and failures created by DHS, FEMA, and other governmental agencies all the way down the line.

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 28 — On the eve of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike here, President Bush returned to the devastated region on Monday promising to continue federal assistance and, with his presidency still under the shadow of the slow response to the storm, eagerly pointed out signs of progress in reconstructing the Gulf Coast.

But as another storm rolled toward Florida, with thousands of victims from Hurricane Katrina still uprooted, Mr. Bush admitted there were “a lot of problems left.”

Winding his way through tattered towns in Mississippi on his way here, Mr. Bush spent the day demonstrating empathy and optimism, touring rebuilt areas and meeting with local officials and residents in his 13th trip to the area since the storm.

The journey was part of a continuing effort to recast his image from last year, when Mr. Bush stayed on the West Coast before cutting short his vacation to deal with one of the most significant crises of his administration. His popularity was severely damaged after the storm, which killed about 1,500 people and flooded most of New Orleans, and it has never fully recovered.

In sweltering midday heat, his shirt soaked with sweat, Mr. Bush told a group of Biloxi, Miss., residents that he knew the rebuilding was so slow that to some it felt as if nothing was happening.

Still, Mr. Bush said, “For a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things are changing.”

“I feel the quiet sense of determination that’s going to shape the future of Mississippi,” he said.

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square here last September, Mr. Bush spoke in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass.

After a dinner Monday night with New Orleans officials, including Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Mr. Bush is scheduled to tour city neighborhoods on Tuesday and deliver another speech. He is also planning to return to Jackson Square for a memorial service at St. Louis Cathedral.

As the president spoke in Biloxi, he was flanked by Mississippi’s two senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran and Gov. Haley Barbour, all three of them Republicans, and Don Powell, the Gulf Coast reconstruction coordinator. Watching from the sidelines was Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, whose presence was a reminder of the reshuffling at the White House after the former chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., failed to manage the storm crisis.

Nearby, along the ocean, ravaged antebellum homes and churches dotted the waterfront. The beach from Gulfport, Miss., to Biloxi, was deserted. Debris hung from trees and motels stood shuttered. Blue tarpaulins still patched the roofs of most dwellings. Written in green spray paint on a fence around a home in Biloxi was “You loot, I shoot.”

In Washington and around the country Monday, Hurricane Katrina continued to occupy a prominent place in the political arena. Both the White House and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill issued “fact sheets” with competing assertions about the rate of progress and the nation’s ability to cope with another disaster.

“One year later, neither the tragedy Katrina caused — the flooding of New Orleans and the devastation of the Gulf Coast — nor the tragedy that it exposed — the extent of the federal government’s failure to provide a life of security and dignity to all of our citizens — have been adequately addressed,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said in a statement.

In late August of 2005, as the hurricane approached and scientists warned of a potential disaster, Mr. Bush was on vacation at his ranch outside Crawford, Tex., where the most pressing problem was an antiwar protest.

When the storm actually hit and his advisers began to realize the scope of the catastrophe, Mr. Bush was in Southern California on a campaign-style travel swing. Images of a remote president playing guitar on a military base, then later posing for a picture as he peered out the window of Air Force One as it flew over the devastation helped fuel the perception that Mr. Bush failed to respond adequately to the storm.

This year, Mr. Bush is also returning to Crawford — his final stop on Tuesday — before heading out to campaign in Arkansas, Tennessee and Utah this week. The overnight stay comes after an abbreviated vacation, in Crawford earlier this month and at his parents’ home in Kennebunkport, Me., last weekend, and two days of commemorating the hurricane anniversary.

Speaking to reporters Monday after visiting United States Marine Inc., a company in Gulfport that builds military boats, Mr. Bush predicted that the rebuilding effort would take “years, not months.”

“There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered,” the president said. “Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses.”

But, he continued: “It’s hard to describe the devastation down here. It was massive in its destruction, and 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.”