I spoke far too soon

For the past two days I have been watching the painful images of New Orleans, a city dying. I think this is the first time that an entire big American city has been evacuated and closed. At lunch today, a few people were gathered around one of the big TVs in our office, watching coverage of a supermarket being looted. The camera pulled back and I realized it was the Winn-Dixie on Tchoupitoulas St that I shopped at three years ago with the kids when we last visited Steph.

Then I went over to NOLA.com and read that the looters went from that store over to Sports Authority, where people were trying to steal the guns and ammo. Some people have taken a postal truck and are driving it around with assault weapons. At this point, the food and water is running out. As always, I am disgusted with Bush's lack of response to this incredible crisis - but just to calibrate my reaction (since I'm prone to Bush disgust), I looked at a couple of other sites and found out that it's not just me who can't believe what's going on now. This was posted by Rich Lowry on the National Review site:

I know people are sick of this, but one more e-mail:

A lot of Bush fans are frankly aghast at how tone-deaf the president is at this moment. They just showed clips of New Orleans prisoners sitting in a huge group, some of them handcuffed together with plastic cuffs with flood water lapping at their feet. They have been there for two days. Prisoners have their shirts pulled over their noses because the stench is too overwhelming.

Fox News is the only news crew along a particular stretch of highway downtown. Hundreds of people are standing around, wanting to know where they should go to get water and food. They have not had either for days. Shep Smith showed a 3-year-old boy who was sitting in his mother's lap. He was sick and barely conscious. Dehydrated. Hungry. Not a single authority figure was anywhere around. Shep had to turn his interview with a state police spokeswoman into a plea to her to send help to his location for those poor people.

The scenes I'm seeing on Fox are things you'd think you'd only see in Somalia or Bangladesh. This is the United States of America. We can't get a single truck full of water to these people? We can't get a single helicopter to fly over and drop supplies? A cop car and a military truck roll up from the distance, giving the suffering people hope. Do they stop as the desperate wave? No. They drive through. They can't even stop to tell them where they should go to get any life-saving water or food.

I am starting to feel a mixture of outrage and shame...

Gasoline is reported at $4.99/gallon in Atlanta. Stations in North Carolina and South Carolina are running out of supplies. There are lines growing everywhere. Thousands of people are at mortal risk because the federal response has been so slow in coming. Major levee restoration projects were all but cancelled two years ago because Bush shifted the money to Iraq.

Bush needs to resign. That's all there is too it. It's so hard to watch the country crumbling before your eyes, while the president plays his cute little Presidential Guitar. Congratulations, you're Nero. I'm not even angry, because we could've predicted this before it happened. This is all that he is capable of. Why was he not in Louisiana on Tuesday, taking a helicopter tour with Sen. Landrieu? How would that have been so hard? What the HELL is wrong with him? Is he drugged up? We have never had a president who has not done a single thing right, but Bush only has a couple of years left to claim that title.