Wednesday, March 08, 2006

The nail in his coffin?

[An old story, at this point, but one not yet discussed here, and perhaps not known to the news-averse people who read this blog.]

George W. Bush, it seems, has once again been outed as a liar. Not long after Katrina hit, the president appeared on TV and told America: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

We knew he was lying at the time, because it wasn't news to anyone that NOLA's levees were in bad shape. Now, (ok, last week) the AP has discovered that Bush attended a briefing THE DAY BEFORE KATRINA HIT where federal disaster officials warned Bush that the storm could breach over-run levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers. [Video] [Update: A breach is not the same as an overrun, but so what? Bush was warned that water might enter NOLA and kill people. The fact that the water entered via a breach and not an overrun doesn't excuse him for being unprepared. And it was especially disengenuous for him to go on TV claiming that he was totally surprised that water entered the city, when he was told before the storm that it would happen. ]

At the briefing, Bush didn't ask a single question; later he told state officials that he was "fully prepared" (which as it turns out, he wasn't)

It comes down to this: George W. Bush lacks the competance to serve as president. We thought this was true back in September, when we presumed, simply, that he was innocently unaware of what civil engineers and disaster experts had been saying for years.

Now it turns out he was VERY much aware of the coming danger, yet he sat on his hands anyway.