This morning I woke up to CNN and heard the voice of man on the telephone that sounded like desperate voice of a man making a 911 call pleading for emergency assistance. It was New Orleans mayor Ray Naign on the telephone in an audio interview with a radio station. Mayor Naign was beyond a state of panic over the situation in New Orleans and by the end of the phone interview he broke down and cried and asked to end the interview.
120 hours have ticked away on the clock, since the epic disaster of Katrina,& the Bush administration has yet to pick up the phone and respond Ray Naign's cry for help.
Every American needs to hear Ray Naign's message. It the plea of a man who is beyond fear and no longer cares about about bureaucratic protocol. His message: Not one single thing has been done by the Bush administration or the GOP congress to help New Orleans: no federal troops, no food, no water, no FEMA, no medical supplies, NO NOTHING! We are five days in to the worst disaster in the history of the country and Mayor Ray Nagin is saying that all he's getting from Washington is a bunch of bureaucratic double talk.
He said the president has to get "the hell off his butt" and act on the disaster. Naign can hardly contain his rage. FEMA should have been on the scene within an hour with water, food and medical supplies and 120 hours later, without so much as a FEMA representative or a single federal troop Ray Nagin was beginning to wonder if the New Orleans is being left to twist in the wind in a state of anarchy.
Meanwhile Naign is hearing reports from the Oval Office of federal troops "maintaining order" in New Orleans and those troops simply aren't there! It's all a lie said Naign, the fed has no presence anywhere in the pile of debris that used to be the Cresent City. Junkies that are "jonesing out" for lack of a fix are overunning the city. Naign trying to contain the small but violent group of junkies to one section of the city until they withdraw and stop rampaging in gangs searching for a drug fix that isn't there. The addicts have been breaking into hospitals and undermining medical treatment of victims in dire need of help.
Naign said he was beyond the fear of political consequences from the Bush administration and he felt it was his responsibility to prod Bush into action, when rats were feasting on the dead bodies littering the streets. The White House not to make a public statement commenting on the chaos in New Orleans, because any intemperate remarks would result in a slow down of disaster relief to the city.
"Cover your butt" and maintain spin control is the primary concern in the Oval Office. Naign said he's sick of D.C. press conferences and all of the fingerpointing by the GOP and they'd better do something more than stand around like a bunch of morons saying "It's not my fault."
New Orleans had become a nightmarish scenario of medieval city under the siege of the Black Death epidemic. The barbarians are no longer at the gate but are among us, rampaging, pillaging, raping and looting what's left of the city.
Naign now he fears that there will be an epidemic of any number of diseases without any fully functioning hospitals to treat victims.
Remember all the hundreds of medical triage teams that were at the 9/11 site on the very evening of the disaster? Nargin said 5 days later, there isn't a single doctor or triage team providing treatment on demand in the entire city. Fear and loathing in New Orleans; reckless incompetence in Washington D.C.
So what's Bush doing today? He's "touring" Mobile Alabama for photo ops with beleaguered residents to make it appear that he "cares." Why is he going to Mobile Alabama, when Ground Zero of Katrina is 300 miles away? The fact of the matter is Bush can't do any photo-ops with "beleaguered residents" in New Orleans because the beleaguered residents of New Orleans are a howling mob of angry people. Bush would likely have a mob of desparate of club wielding vigilantes chase him down right back up the ramp back into Air Force One. That's not the kind of photo-op Bush is looking for.
Touring Mobile Alabama is yet another wasted day. If Bush were serious about making things happen he'd be back at the Oval Office working the phones around the clock to make sure New Orleans was restored to order. Unlike 9/11, Bush can't simply put on a fireman's costume, get a bullhorn, spend ten minutes for a photo-op and pretending like he "cares". The scope of this disaster makes 9/11 look like a picnic.
Bush needs to go. His entire administration needs to go. The GOP Congress and Senate need to go. They have abdicated all responsibility to the people of New Orleans and the people of this nation. I shudder to think about three more years of rule under these reckless incompetents in the GOP who can't lift a finger to give a glass of water to a man dying of dehydration in the streets of one of the nation's greatest cities.
The conservative Christians got the Apocalypse they wished for and it had nothing to do with four horsemen. Every GOP officeholder in Washington should resign tomorrow; we'd get more done to restore order to the New Orleans and the Gulf Coast without them.