We’ve talked before about differing ideas of leadership, and what a President should look like. We’re all going to have at least slightly different ideas of how a leader should act and convey himself. I’m kidding around a little, but would President Martin Sheen/Bartlet be up there in New Orleans, shouting Latin imprecations at the church while a jazz bland plays Louis Armstrong in the background? I hope not. That’s not what I want in a leader.

For my part, I have yet to find a single politician that competently represents MY core values, and I was born and raised in the U.S. This includes Bush, Kerry and Bartlet (so to speak). I would like to think, however, that the millions of people who did vote for the man that they thought came closest to representing foundational American values don’t share Bush’s apparent sociopathic tendencies. Otherwise, that’s a lot of whackos out there.

Unless the entirety of investigative journalism has been completely subverted toward supporting the President (and I mean ALL of the journalists, from the Village Voice to the New York Times), I don’t think you’re going to run into a media blackout regarding Bush’s security detail inadvertently causing more deaths in LA. If you don’t find the news, it probably just means that it’s just not there. Doesn’t mean that you should stop looking, though. I’m also willing to bet that Bush’s Secret Service detail isn’t significantly larger, on average, than other Presidents’ details.

The thing that got me in Dowd’s article – and you’d have to read the whole thing to get the context – is that there was an element of the magical castle there. I personally don’t have a big problem with lighting, although that time he lit up the whole Statue of Liberty was a touch overboard in that context. What bothers me more is that I’m pretty certain they’d drag the generators back out again, like the dismantling of the photo op before. And the use of military netting – well, I’m sorry, but that was way over the top.

As for the message of hope, my personal hopeful associations with New Orleans don’t center around the church square. Perhaps a jazz theme might have done it better in this case. He would have been better, if he were going to go with the religion theme, to show a “house of God” shining bright as a marker of the landscape – better to put it in context rather than shrouding the surroundings in (military???) denial.

He recited his solutions as though he were learning them for the first time. Again – he’s just not a leader. I agree with the court jester Lewis Black in that I feel it’s their job to manipulate me better. I’m insulted that it takes so little for us to throw away the things that make us who we are. If we’re going to have puppets, can’t they at least get someone who can realistically act like a President? Martin Sheen, someone like that?

Unfortunately, the whole thing just seemed as fake as his “can-do” attitude. He and his cronies are not competent to represent American citizens and foundational values.

competent
1. Properly or sufficiently qualified; capable.
2. Capable of performing an allotted or required function.
3. Legally qualified or fit to perform an act.
4. Able to distinguish right from wrong and to manage one’s affairs.

incompetent
1. Not qualified in legal terms: a defendant who was incompetent to stand trial.
2. Inadequate for or unsuited to a particular purpose or application.
3. Incapable of proper functioning.
4. Devoid of those qualities requisite for effective conduct or action.

New Orleans, for me, shows exactly what happens in a welfare state for the benefit of the few – those aims are all that matter and anything else is simple manipulation to achieve those priorites. When a real American government is needed, well – it’s just not really there. Bush is responding only to the political fallout and nothing else. I’m beginning to feel that he may actually me more than simply a dry drunk – he may be a sociopath (a personality disorder characterised by a continuous and persistent pattern of aggressive behaviour in which the rights of others are violated).

But you’re right that his using electricity there didn’t take it away from anyone else. It may take me a while to find the people that died for lack of transportation while air traffic was grounded for his last photo op, but I won’t stop looking. It’s very possible that people are hestitant to make that connection right now. Even if I can’t show that for sure, I believe the principle still holds. Frankly, that level of personal security was just simply less important than the welfare of those Americans.

Court jesters and poets (those two groups of people who best tell the grain of truth with the right exaggerations) always get respect and recognition from me. Granola-powered hamster wheel – heh heh. Very condensed caricature – many points on that (grin).

At the time of Bush’s speech in New Orleans, the order was for mandatory evacuations; everyone with a bullhorn, a boat, and a tiny bit of authority was trolling the streets, calling for people to get out (and helping them do so). Anyone foraging in the muck for food must have been doing so by conscious choice, not because the President set up some lights for his speech and they couldn’t do otherwise. It’s not a zero-sum game, where if the President gives a speech in one place, another place goes without electricity.

Again, we run into the problem where Bush is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. On one hand, he’s accused of showing poor leadership by not visiting the disaster area soon enough. On the other hand, when he does show up at the disaster area, he’s accused of tastelessness for setting up lights so that the cameras can see him. Using video cameras is part of what I do for a living, and they need plenty of light in order to work properly.

The people who drowned and died in hospitals also had nothing to do with the set-up for the speech. I honestly don’t understand the connection.

“What do they do with the military camouflage netting that so nicely framed the church and hid the reality?”

At what point have we been spared the reality of Katrina’s aftermath? When Anderson Cooper and Shep Smith were wading through the floating detritus, pointing cameras at dead bodies 24/7, didn’t we get enough of the reality? While we all like to actually understand what’s going on (aka getting the Truth), at times it’s not a bad idea to show something less horrific to take the edge off and give the impression that the entirety of the situation isn’t Death, Death, Death. The church provided the kind of context Bush wanted for his message: there’s hope, we can rebuild, we can use that can-do attitude to make things better than they were. I’m not saying that he did a great job of making the speech, but he did better than he might’ve were the background a camouflaged church swathed in darkness under six feet of sewer water. I can’t imagine a politician that would have staged it differently (except perhaps for Dennis Kucinich, who would have set up lights through a granola-powered hamster wheel run by volunteers. Kidding, kidding!)

As for what happened to the generators after the speech, I hope that they were soon put to good use elsewhere.

I’m not informed enough to comment on voting machines, other than saying that if we can’t trust paper ballots (hanging/dimpled chads) and we can’t trust electronic voting machines (possibility of partisan hijacking), then I have no idea how we can get the vote out now, or how we managed to vote for so long.