We’ve known how the media “failed to ask the hard questions” of this administration, how they have played the role of stenographer rather than reporter, how when they have asked questions they have accepted patently false answers as gospel. I have iterated in this space how ABC News to this day acts as a platform for the administration’s scare mongering by airing handout pieces from the DHS on terrorism as if they were news.
In How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned at Salon on Friday was revealed just how truly awful this administration has been. Go read the article. To some degree there is not all that much new, as it has been known that politics were played with this event at the cost of lives.
The article describes how Bush demanded that a state with a Democratic governor federalize its National Guard, while he freely sent federal aid to two states with Republican governors without that demand. But there is worse to come, far worse.
To be truly appalled, read in detail about this recollection by Mary Landrieu, Senator from Louisiana – a recollection of a lie staged by Bush and Company with the assistance of the Army Corps of Engineers, a lie concealed by the media.
“So we landed at the canal, five minutes from my house.” The Senator says, “I was so excited because they were finally doing something. The Corps of Engineers was there, and they had dump trucks and sandbags. All the cameras were there for the president, who was doing one of his famous press conferences about how he was going to do everything. So I thought, 'At least the guy is doing something, so show your manners and be good and smile.'”
And then,
On Friday, Mary Landrieu had been with Bush and Blanco as they toured the 17th Street Canal, where, at last, major work had commenced to repair the damage that had been caused when the levee broke. "Then, on Saturday," Landrieu says, "George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, 'George, I'm tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what's going on down here. … You get a helicopter and I'll go up and I will show you what is actually happening.’ … So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, 'George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can't send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.' So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there -- people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it."
George Stephanopoulos knew, and he said nothing.
If Stephanopoulos wasn’t at the prior day’s photo-op, he certainly knew of it and he had merely to run clips from his own news agency to have proof. He was in the helicopter with Mary Landrieu when she made the discovery, so he had a grandstand view of the duplicity. He knew exactly how dishonest the President had been with the people of this nation, the lengths to which the President had gone to stage the lie, the enormity of the lie, and he did not tell us. He kept silent, concealed the lie, was complicit in the lie.
The Republican Party started the process of removing Section 4 from Article 2 of The Constitution of the United States of America, impeachment of the President, and the current Democratic Congress in the person of Nancy Pelosi completed it in a self-serving political move to enhance the power of her party to the detriment of her nation.
Future criminals in the White House will forever be able to point to depraved actions such as this photo-op in New Orleans and say in their own defense, “You did not impeach for this.”
Neither the media nor Congress will bring these criminals to account.
I can only hope that sometime between the 5th of November and the 20th of January congress will come to its senses, and impeach Bush and Cheney, and maybe a few cabinet officers.
ReplyDeleteOf course, what they need is not sense, but guts. Maybe the new congress will have the guts and awareness of its own place in America that Pelosi lacks. The new congress meets as of the 3rd of January, so they will have over two weeks to impeach them, before they leave office. Plenty of time, although probably not enough to try them as well. But it would be a start.