For George W. Bush, pride goeth before the fall

We already know that our so-called President has refused offers of aid from over a dozen countries. Now it seems he's refused offers of help from the city of Chicago:

A visibly angry Mayor Daley said the city had offered emergency, medical and technical help to the federal government as early as Sunday to assist people in the areas stricken by Hurricane Katrina, but as of Friday, the only things the feds said they wanted was a single tank truck.

That truck, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency requested to support an Illinois-based medical team, was en route Friday.

"We are ready to provide more help than they have requested. We are just waiting for their call," said Daley, adding that he was "shocked" that no one seemed to want the help.

[snip]

Daley said the city offered 36 members of the firefighters' technical rescue teams, eight emergency medical technicians, search-and-rescue equipment, more than 100 police officers as well as police vehicles and two boats, 29 clinical and 117 non-clinical health workers, a mobile clinic and eight trained personnel, 140 Streets and Sanitation workers and 29 trucks, plus other supplies. City personnel are willing to operate self-sufficiently and would not depend on local authorities for food, water, shelter and other supplies, he said

Bush has refused offers of help from countries he and his mindless, grinning apostles have been bashing ever since they refused to buy his bullshit about Iraq. He refused to take any action, choosing instead of remain on vacation, until the political fallout became so great he had to do something. People have been locked into the Convention Center and the Superdome and are being prevented from leaving the city.

The mayor of Chicago is a Democrat, The Governor of Louisiana is a Democrat. The Mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat. The people who had vehicles and/or could afford to evacuate the city in time are eating jambalaya and reading donated library books at the 5000-seat Cajundome in nearby Lafayette. The people who are too poor to afford cars, had no money left at the end of the month for tickets on the Greyhound busses that stopped running on Saturday; the people who refused to leave their ill loved ones behind -- those people are poor and black.

Can we please do the math here? We already know that Karl Rove's modus operandi is that any Democrat is fair game; he proved that by endangering Valerie Plame to get back at her husband "because he's a Democrat." We already know that blue states receive less federal money back for every dollar paid in than red states do. And God knows we know that the Bush Administration doesn't give a shit about the poor.

I've been blasted for calling what's going on in New Orleans "small-scale genocide." But when you lock people into sweltering buildings with no ventilation, no sanitation facilities, no food, and no water; when you have armed guards preventing people from leaving town on their own two feet, when you're dropping airlifts of water from 10 feet up in the air so half the bottles break upon impact, when six days into a disaster there are still babies being fed mashed potato chips and water in a desperate attempt to keep them alive, you don't HAVE to drop the Zyklon-B tablets into the water -- you're killing these people just the same.

At least the gas chambers were relatively quick.

And don't give me shit about trivializing the Holocaust. My grandmothers parents died in Hitler's camps, as did many of her siblings. The government is killing people in New Orleans by not allowing them to leave. That's the reality.

The question isn't whether analogies to the Third Reich are accurate. The question is why we aren't enough different from the countries where this sort of response in a disaster is routine. This is America. We're supposed to be better than this. I'm ashamed of my country's leadership. I'm ashamed that enough Americans voted for these people that they're still in power. I'm ashamed that there are people who think it's OK to punish the population of a state because its leaders are from a different political party. I'm ashamed that there are still so many Americans who are defending this Administration, because misplaced partisan loyalty and their own pathetic little egos can't admit that they were wrong. There's no disgrace in being wrong. Everyone wants to believe that our leaders are doing the right thing and acting in goodwill. But when they don't, defending them doesn't make it so.