This is how bad it is. This video just confirms everything I’ve always known. Which is that Bush has blood on his hands. Because whether you intended to kill people or not, the fact remains that if you knowingly and negligently fail to act and people die, that’s manslaughter.

I refer you to Merriam Webster’s definition:

Main Entry: involuntary manslaughter
Function: noun
: manslaughter resulting from the failure to perform a legal duty expressly required to safeguard human life, from the commission of an unlawful act not constituting a felony, or from the commission of a lawful act in a negligent or improper manner

I wish I still had the righteous anger and indignation to be enraged, but instead, I am just brutally sickened. That’s bad.

There are those who say that the failure was not just Bush’s alone. and that’s certainly true enough.

Information was available early. Over years, cuts in funding were made which should not have been, given the probability of serious and life-threatening problems. *LOTS* of people dropped the ball in handling the early warnings, because no one knew what to do. Protocol got in the way, and utter ineptitude by people who were supposed to have a handle and have a *PLAN*.

Once the storm hit, the complete lack of adequate preparation at multiple levels meant that the meagre plans went out the window, and desperation set in. Up until this point, I can share the blame around.

But this is where things started to get bad. And here is where I blame Bush. Because at this moment in time, when things started to look really bleak, when catastrophe was everywhere and chaos all around, when all the world was watching horror unfold, when people were drowning on live television and dying like dogs in the street…he could have single-handedly saved people’s lives. *He alone* had the power to do away with all the red tape, all the bureaucracy when it mattered most. And at the very end that’s what he did. He came swooping in with a mighty show of force, mustering all the resources available to the national government… lo and behold, the great messianic saviour. and because he deliberately, willfully failed to do that sooner, in his cloud of obstinant bullheaded denial at the nightmare on the evening news, in his feigned deafness to the plaintive cries for help… because he wanted to maintain his cultivated veil of ignorance, americans died.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. But I will never forgive him for that.

manslaughter. that’s how bad it is.

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