Good for you Barnes & Noble founder

Gonzales wasn't incompetent.
He did exactly what he was supposed to do.
Gave them the legal cover they needed to trash the Constitution, stepped aside while they politicized the DOJ in an unprecedented fashion, and then lied...er...forgot all about everything when he was under oath.

 

Hey, I can't blame you for being pissed at Bush about everything. I'm still pissed with how bad he fucked up the battle of Fredericksburg.

 

brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.

 

By flying back to the White House, it would have shown that he was on top of the situation, and that he cared about what was going on during and after the hurricane. It's the same reason that they want presidents to make nationally-televised speeches either during or after a disaster, to show the American people that, yes, there still is someone in charge, and to remain calm. The Schiavo incident proved that he is willing to cut his vacation short for political gain, yet he wasn't willing to do so when people really needed help.

All Bush needed to do was to fly back to the W.H., bring in Cheney, Rice, etc., into the Situation Room, break out a keg of beer, and send Scott McClellan out every few hours to tell the media that 'the president was monitoring the situation and is very concerned." Then, after sobering up, he could have made a nationally-televised speech saying "We stand with our friends who are struggling right now, blah, blah, blah." Nope, no speech until over a month later. Bush took less time to declare the Iraq War over than to talk about Katrina on TV.

Ultimately, Bush could have looked like he cared about the American people. Instead, he chose to remain on vacation, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned. As the Repubs loved to say during the Clinton era, "Appearances count!"

As for the political crony argument, sure, presidents hire cronies, not that it is right. What they do is hire them for some position, such as "Secretary of Watching Grass Grow." They don't put them in a job that requires real competence in case of a disaster. They put trained professionals there.

 

I think Lewis Black said it best (you could say that about a lot of things, but this fits here).
"Did they look at his resume? He was head of an Arabian horse association. What does that entail? Sitting in an arena and saying... "Next. Next. Next. Next."
If any of you read "The Great Deluge" by Douglas Brinkley, you'll know just what a "heck of a job" Brownie and George W. did. in Naw'lins.
Talk about fiddling while Rome burned.....

 

By the way, it's threads like this that make me glad I patronize Barnes & Noble and not Books-A-Million, the Wal-Mart of bookstores....

 

Perhaps the savior of Barnes & Noble could...buy a newspaper chain.

Seriously, it'd be a great, higher purpose-oriented outlet for Riggio's philanthropic tendencies, and is something that would even make some business sense.

It should be a given that the two somewhat related businesses -- newspapers and bookstores -- each have similarly vested interests in getting/keeping readers. And both are struggling to adjust and remain relevant, or, even, in existence, in today's reader-unfriendly world.

Maybe we should join forces...

 

Holy fuck, people... Do I really need to use the blue font, when two posts earlier I said how awesome this was...?

 

Careful there, dude. It's likely that the only company that more for the recovery efforts that did more than Wal-Mart was Home Depot, though I'll back down on that if anyone shows verifiable reports to the contrary.

And guys, if the only think you can think of to say in any thread mentioning New Orleans is "Helluva job, Brownie," then just leave it the fuck alone. That particular horse has beaten miles beyond death.

 

I was comparing Books-A-Million to Wal-Mart in terms of selection/atmosphere, not what they did in terms of N.O's Katrina recovery.
Although I do agree that "helluva job, Brownie" has become a bit cliche.