Oyster at Your Right Hand Thief has a great post on Bush’s delaying of restoring the wetlands of South Louisiana and rebuilding better levees in New Orleans. As Oyster says, Bush is just running out the clock…
Just over a year ago, a conservative Republican who attends my church took out a quarter page ad in the Times Picayune,
and published an open letter to the people of New Orleans. He urged
everyone to vote in favor of consolidating the levee boards. He said he
was convinced “in his heart” that if New Orleanians demonstrated their
willingness to reform the levee boards, then President Bush would start
supporting Category 5 flood protection.
Yes, friends, he really
believed that would happen. Of course, that was back when people down
here thought there was a chance in hell of getting Category 5
protection. Little did they know that the Bush administration had told
officials like Senator Vitter that they didn’t even like the term Category 5. The Bushies found it “unhelpful”. Mind you, the term wasn’t “unhelpful” because the Bushies thought it was scientifically fuzzy, or anything like that. Hell no. The Bushies didn’t fancy “Category 5” because the term itself framed the issue of flood control in a disadvantageous way.
It conjured up thoughts of maximum protection, and they didn’t want it
associated with Louisiana. Either they didn’t want to pay for Category
5 protections, or they didn’t want Louisiana to have them. So they
instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to study it to death, and leave the problem to some other President.