On the second anniversary of the levee failures in New Orleans which killed over 1,000; demolished 250,000 homes and destroyed 80% of a major US city, George Bush came to New Orleans to speak.
Predictably, his comments were largely dishonest, but he did let slip an important truth that his handler Karl Rove had worked mightily to suppress since the moment the Feds realized the levees had failed:
The levees is New Orleans are a FEDERAL responsibility.
New Orleans is at the mouth of the Mississippi River one of the most important thoroughfares in the United States. Keeping New Orleans safe and functional in the face of natural challenges is of high level strategic and economic importance to the United States.
Thus, the federally controlled US Army Corps of Engineers were put in charge of the levees decades ago. The construction and maintenance of the levees are a FEDERAL responsibility - and so was their failure.
And so is hundreds of billions of dollars in damages caused when because of shoddy construction they collapsed. In reality, the federal government is legally, ethically and morally obligated to restore New Orleans to its pre-levee failure state, just as you would be if your negligence caused someone to suffer a loss.
Yet Bush and his idiot supporters talk about New Orleans as if it were a local problem, a random act of nature rained down on people living in "the wrong place", and that New Orleans needs to pull itself up by its bootstraps.
But here, for one brief moment, the President spoke the truth.
Too bad the perpetually asleep-at-the-wheel US news media didn't pick up on it.
