Oh No She Ddnt!

Did my ears tell me right?  Regarding the hurricane victims new living arrangements in Texas, did I actually just watch video of  Mamma Bush saying,  "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Oh my gawd!
Hear the audio here


Here’s an intelligent and irate take on the politics of Katrina.
BY LYNN SWEET SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
WASHINGTON -- I want to vent.
On Friday, President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush deployed from the White House to the Gulf region ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
But the Bushes' photo-op tour is meaningless if people are still marooned on rooftops.
The Hurricane Katrina storyline is simple. At its essence at this point, people are either on high, dry ground with some food and water, needed medical attention and a place to sleep -- or they are not.
Bush is in a no flim-flam zone.
When he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, much of the nation trusted his word and backed him on the war. Now people can, as Ronald Reagan famously said, trust but verify. Cable television viewership is up. The images are overwhelming.
Four days after the hurricane touched down, there is anarchy in New Orleans. People are dying in the city streets. Mass evacuations are a mess. It's taking days to marshal federal assistance for the hardest-hit areas
of Louisiana and Mississippi.
People who were festering in the Superdome in the Crescent City were bused to Houston only to be turned away at the door of the Astrodome because of someone's inept planning.
Katrina is not 9/11 and that's why Bush faces a more difficult political challenge. He does not start with sympathy on his side. His newly reorganized Homeland Security Department, which absorbed the well-regarded-until-this-week Federal Emergency Management Agency, failed its first test.
He's also squandered his political capital. This domestic crisis, one that can define his administration as much as 9/11 and the Iraq war, comes as every major poll shows Bush's approval ratings at the lowest point since he took office.
Gas prices are soaring. Cindy Sheehan, a face of the anti-Iraq war movement, is taking her campaign to Washington after camping out near Bush's Texas ranch. The issues are merging and that puts Bush at a dangerous political intersection when Congress returns after Labor Day from a long summer vacation.
Bush's leadership deserves to be questioned. Republicans understandably are muted.
What are Democrats supposed to do -- sit and say nothing in order to avoid being accused of playing politics?
That's too high a price to pay.
Bush's plate is full.
The cost of gas. The cost of the Iraq War. The cost to rebuild the devastated communities.
All the issues are related and for Bush it boils down to pocketbook politics.
I just don't see how Bush can continue to promote the same domestic priorities.
If the hurricane served to backburner Bush's plan to privatize a portion of Social Security, then at least some good came from the disaster.
If the hurricane at last forces Bush to seriously ask the people of the U.S. to conserve fuel, that's for the better too.
And as the nation will need more money to respond to this latest crisis, perhaps Bush may have to consider his campaigns to give tax cuts to the country's wealthiest citizens.
The White House is putting Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on all the Sunday morning news shows. To what end, if people still have not been rescued?
Perhaps Chertoff will use the time to remind the nation that September is National Preparedness Month.
***
I watched Mrs. Bush on Friday afternoon at her press availability at the Cajundome arena in Lafayette, La.
I'm appalled.
The Bush White House found an apparent relative island of calm for her to visit in the horrific chaos left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
"This doesn't really look like what we're seeing on television,'' she said.
To translate: she is in a place where the disaster relief effort is going well. So the message to the viewing public, don't believe everything you see.
She means well, I suppose, but Mrs. Bush, I can only say that you have not been watching enough TV. I'm thrilled the situation at the Cajundome is under control.
The problem is not the places that are working.
As Mrs. Bush is talking, CNN is running her comments on a split screen showing video tape of evacuees -- the old and sick -- limping on the tarmac of the Louis Armstrong airport in New Orleans.
A woman, lying on her back, is being wheeled off the runway on a baggage rack as if she were a piece of luggage.
Before leaving the White House on Friday, Bush said "the results are not acceptable,'" an overwhelming understatement in the wake of the miserable failure of the world's only superpower to provide even minimum food and water to hurricane victims.
"The people of New Orleans have got to understand there's a lot of people working hard, and they're making good progress," Bush said after touching down in New Orleans.
Evacuees. Refugees. Would we even be using those words, usually reserved for third world nations, not our own, if most of the homeless and helpless in New Orleans were middle- and upper-class white and not seemingly impoverished African Americans who apparently did not have the financial means to escape the storm?
The Bushes were managing images on Friday.
This MBA president needs to manage people.
GOP pollster Frank Luntz suggested when we talked that the president should have just called in former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose post- 9/11 leadership is unquestioned.
But he did not, and the pictures of the reality trump -- or at least checkmate -- the president's words, even his optimistic pledge to build a new New Orleans.
I called Barbie Zelizer, a professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a scholar whose specialty is the impact of images.
"The important thing to recognize here is the pictures are communicating a different message than what is being touted as the official line of the administration,'' said Zelizer.
People understand what they are seeing.
The pictures are very clear.
Lynn Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.