Whim & a Prayer - Rightwing War against Nature creates another quagmire

As if the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq were not bad enough; as if Republican lies and deceit leading this nation into a needless war and occupation, one that creates more terrorists by the day and drains our national guard, were not bad enough; as if the White House outing of an undercover CIA operative and its manufacturing of phony news were not bad enough; now the ongoing extreme rightwing War against Nature has created another quagmire as well. You've probably read the litany of ecological blunders the present occupants in the White House and their enablers in congress have exposed our nation to; the list is long and painful. But the epic tragedy they have engineered on the Gulf coast here in the U.S. may well be the height of their folly.

The neglect of the levees, the disregard for wetlands, the over-development of the coastline, the cuts in funding for environmental enforcement and the neo-con hostility toward science combined in New Orleans to set the stage for overwhelming disaster. In his recent damage-repair speech before the statue of Andrew Jackson, another occupant of the White House noted for a less than stellar record in race relations and honesty, George W. Bush spoke of the "whims of nature" as if humanity had no effect upon the planet. Hurricane Katrina was not, I repeat NOT a "natural disaster".

Regardless of what some reactionary flat-earth extremists may claim, the jury is no longer out on this: human activity effects the planet's climate, period. George Bush, the man from Big Oil, and his corporate cronies only make matters worse in their denial of science. The sooner these industrial addicts move on to acceptance the sooner we'll be able to soften the ecological blow to our grandchildren. But acceptance of the realities of the natural world were not in Bush's lexicon that steamy night in the Big Easy. Instead he waxed poetic about hope and faith, as if prayer might change the laws of nature, as if prayer might allow us to continue consuming vast amounts of oil and spewing countless quantities of waste into the environment forever unto the end of time.

The fact that George W. Bush, perhaps for the first time in his political career, actually took a degree of responsibility for a failure, in this case failures in the federal response to the disaster in New Orleans, proves just how vulnerable this administration has become. During that speech Bush proposed big government aid programs and the need to address issues of race and poverty. To some his words may have sounded as reasonable as those old refrains about "compassionate conservatism" that vanished so many years gone past. It's too late. The Bush regime has lied to us so many times about so many issues that their credibility has gone the way of the fetid floodwater being pumped out of the Big Easy. It's time for the rightwing to fold up its tent and get out of town. Like the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mess in New Orleans and the Gulf will have to be cleaned up by others. We can't depend on the Bush regime to do the job. We'll have to do it ourselves.