MR. BFRY BREAKS DOWN YOUR WORLD

Barbara "I'm the Matriarch" Bush thinks since many of the refugees were poor to begin with, they should be happy living in the Astrodome internment camp. Yeaaaaah....

WTF

and she raised George W.

H. W. is the coolest Bush, the rest SUCK.

A lot of annoying-ass celebrities will talk and talk and talk; Sean Penn puts his money--and the sweat of his brow--where his mouth is. Despite incorrect "media" reports, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said he personally saw Penn rescue about 40 people, going into the toxic water and carrying them out himself. Reports of reports of an "entourage" were also inaccurrate.

Give him his due props.

Op-Ed Columnist
New Orleans and Baghdad

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 9, 2005
Memo to: Iraq's Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni leaders.
From: An American friend.
Dear Sirs: As someone who really wishes you well, I am writing to give you my best sense of how the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is going to affect the U.S. mission in Iraq. Let me begin with an analogy offered by Michael Mandelbaum, author of the forthcoming book "The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century." He points out: "The U.S. military presence in Iraq today is like the dikes and levees that were protecting New Orleans from the flood. The equivalent of the flood for Iraq is a civil war between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. The U.S. military right now is holding that back."
Therefore, the key question in Iraq is whether your constitutional process now unfolding can produce a power-sharing accord between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that can be a homegrown, self-sustaining dike against civil war, replacing the Americans. In the wake of Katrina, this is now an urgent question. No, we will not be pulling out tomorrow just because of Katrina, let alone before your December parliamentary elections. But after that, when we will be in a Congressional election year, who knows what pressures may build.
Why? Because most Democrats have opposed the war from the start, and many Republicans no longer support the war per se, but only George Bush. The president has carried this war on his shoulders, and the more he's weakened politically by Katrina, the less he will be able to carry. Yes, Mr. Bush has said we'll do whatever it takes to finish the job in Iraq, but he said that before there was another huge job to do.
Can you imagine if Mr. Bush had to go to Congress this week to ask for yet another $100 billion to keep fixing Iraq, when an entire U.S. city needs rebuilding? And the Katrina TV drama is not going away. Hell hath no fury like journalists with a compelling TV story where they get to be the heroes and the government the fools.
Now, as for your draft constitution, it is at one level a remarkable document - a rare example of the elected citizens of an Arab state having a horizontal dialogue and forging their own social contract. There is already more free politics in Iraq than anywhere else in the Arab world except Lebanon. But this draft constitution will come to life only if Iraqi Sunnis of good will publicly embrace it, and up to now they have not.
Some Sunnis are intimidated, others are posturing for the elections, and some are acting in bad faith, still fantasizing that their Baath Party will come to power again. But Sunnis of good will, and Iraq has many, can be brought around if the constitution creates a politically and economically viable central government, and doesn't pave the way for Kurdish and Shiite separatism, which would leave the Sunnis isolated in central Iraq without power or oil.
As Yitzhak Nakash, the Brandeis University expert on the Shiites, put it: "We need to see a form of federalism in Iraq that is uniting Iraqis, not dividing them - a form of federalism that gives Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds a degree of cultural and religious autonomy without compromising either Iraq's political unity or Baghdad's role as the locus of national politics. The draft constitution is not quite there yet."
I know how justifiably bitter the Shiites and the Kurds of Iraq are over what they have suffered at the hands of murderous Sunni Baathists and jihadist fascists. But it is in their interest and ours to see if we can nurture more Iraqi Sunnis who understand that their best future lies in working with a new Iraq, rather than trying to subvert it. Will Iraqi Sunnis, like the Palestinians, waste a generation trying to reverse history - and destroy themselves and Iraq in the process? Or will they accept the fact that they are a minority that can no longer rule all of a fascist Iraq, but can get its fair share of power and oil in a free Iraq? I don't know.
The only way to find out is to make them an offer they can't refuse. If there is a constitution basically supported by all the key parties, a decent outcome is still possible in Iraq. Yes, Mr. Bush says he intends to stay the course there no matter what, but without a constitution embraced by all three communities, there will be no course to stay. The pressure on us to leave will only grow.
And if the dikes of stability that U.S. soldiers are holding together in Iraq give way, well, you all will envy the people of New Orleans. Most of them had somewhere to go when their floods hit. You and your neighbors will not.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Op-Ed Columnist
Osama and Katrina

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 7, 2005
On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."
It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.
Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.
These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.
For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?
And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."
An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.
The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.
Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.
As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."
Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company