Opinion

Death and destruction will be Bush's legacy

By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Contributing Writer

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September 7, 2005—Thousands more bite the dust.

Chalk another one up for the Bush administration. That'll be George W. Bush's long lasting legacy when we look back on the first few years of the 21st Century. Thousands of people killed on U.S. soil because the president failed to protect them.

There won't be any admission of guilt, no one to take responsibility, no one fired for screwing up, just lies and spin, and mud-slinging.

You may be familiar with some of that already.

"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Bush told Diane Sawyer in an interview last week.

That's a page right out of Condoleezza Rice's playbook.

No one "could have predicted that they [al-Qaeda] would try to use a . . . hijacked airplane as a missile," Rice told the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2003.

Wrong and wrong. Or rather, liar, liar.

There were warnings, memos, emails, phone calls, newspaper reports, meetings, threats, and cries for help. They were just ignored by the president and his administration.

Still, there are those who refuse to believe that President Bush and his closest advisers have spent their entire term in office lying to the American public about everything, from the Iraq war to Social Security to the environment to Medicaid and so on.

It's all documented. The lies. In black and white, in intelligence memos, emails, news reports, transcripts. Even with a mountain of evidence stacked against them, the Bush administration behaves like sociopaths.

Perhaps the apocalyptic images of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina will shake these people into reality. The mainstream media have showed a little bit of spine and have asked federal officials some tough questions about the reasons they failed to do their jobs in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Prior to grilling a former official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Anderson Cooper, a CNN talking head, cautioned viewers Sunday that the cable network was going to show gruesome images of corpses scattered amid the wreckage of New Orleans.

"We don't want to gloss this over," Cooper said as the reason CNN was being brutally honest in its reporting.

It would have been nice if those same reporters had a set of balls and asked the same tough questions before the war started in Iraq and showed its viewers the same carnage that littered the streets of Baghdad. There's no doubt its worse over there. But for now we'll take what we can get.

© 2005 Jason Leopold

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at www.jasonleopold.com for updates.