From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
NY Times, September 6, 2005
Clinton Is an Unexpected Partner in the Hurricane Effort
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JOHN M. BRODER
... Mr. Clinton's visit to the Houston shelter on Monday is the latest time
the
former president has come to the current president's aid in his second
term, from early in the year when Mr. Bush was criticized for his slow
response to the tsunami, to initially defending the administration's
response to Hurricane Katrina at the White House last week, to praising the
credentials of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., Mr. Bush's choice for the Supreme
Court. And it offered what many Democrats described as a vivid, if slightly
disconcerting, insight into the complicated and increasingly transactional
relationship between the Bush and Clinton families. ...
[Arianna Huffington had some interesting comments on this (below). I'm not
sure how long Clinton is going to be around making a pest of himself this
way; he looks awful in recent coverage -- older than the elder Bush. In any
event, here's hoping the next natural calamity involves the Clinton
Presidential Library sliding into the Arkansas River.]
Bill Clinton, Suck-Up-in-Chief
What the hell was Bill Clinton thinking, standing there next to President
Bush and providing verbal cover for the administration's ludicrous claims
that the problems plaguing New Orleans were unforeseeable?
He even defended the administration's catastrophic response to Katrina. When
asked on CNN whether the federal response was fast enough, Clinton bobbed,
weaved, and fell back on this utterly absurd claim: "You and I are not in a
position to make any judgment because we weren't there." C'mon, Bill, "...we
weren't there"? I know this sucking up business is hard, but you've got to
do better than that.
This disaster has been extraordinarily revealing, exposing not only Bush's
failure of leadership, and the deadly consequences of his distorted
priorities but also the many, many years of political neglect of the poor
and the needy by both political parties. You couldn't get a much clearer
illustration of the myriad ways that we have indeed become Two Nations than
the stories and pictures coming out of New Orleans this week. Not too many
Bush Pioneers were forced to wallow in their own feces at the Superdome.
But it's mighty hard to have a teachable moment when you have Bill Clinton,
still the reigning symbol of the Democratic Party, failing to connect the
dots between the Bush administration's chronic abandonment of the poor and
its recent abandonment of the poor in the Big Easy -- as well as the dots
between the war in Iraq and the undermining of our security here at home.
And as if all this wasn't enough, there he was defending the indefensible.
"I'm telling you," he said in a White House sit-down with CNN (along with
Bush, Sr.), "nobody thought this was going to happen like this...they had
problems they never could have foreseen." Which is absolutely,
incontrovertibly, and provably untrue (many, many times over). And he is too
smart not to know it.
Instead of acting like a Bush lapdog and gratefully accepting his role as
Co-Disaster-Fund-Raiser-in-Chief, imagine the impact Clinton would have had
if he had stepped up and made the connection between the increase in poverty
and the stagnation in incomes for the fifth straight year and the post-storm
suffering among the poor in New Orleans. Or imagine if he had spoken out
about how the GOP's beloved new bankruptcy bill is going to further the
misery of those ruined by Hurricane Katrina.
Chances to radically shift the national debate, alter the nation's
perspective, and rearrange our priorities don't come along very often. ...
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/bill-clinton-suckupin_b_6716.html>
Carl
