In this administration and in this government…apparently so.
Jess published a portion of their rebuttal letter to Bush from the US Office os Special Counsel:
Letter to President George W. Bush from U.S. Office of Special Counsel, Aug. 4, 2008.
The Department of Defense has pledged to hire an independent engineering company to review allegations. As usual, the wrongdoer cares more about shooting the messenger than listening to the message. William Buckman, the VP and general counsel of MWI called Garzino’s allegations “highly inventive, scurrilous and patently false.”
“To Hell with lives. And to Hell with those peons’ homes… To Hell with truth-tellers. To Hell with conscientious products! To Hell to right and wrong!” That seems to be the prevailing attitude.
It would be lovely to believe that this selfishness and disdain for running effective government was limited to Bush and Cheney. However it’s not!
We have Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins who are the chairpersons of the Homeland Security Department. Both should have been holding investigations into what went wrong in the government response to Katrina, but furthermore, they should have been holding hearings on what to do to improve government responses.
In 2005, it was Bush, Cheney, and Heck-of-a-job-Brownie who were criminally negligent. This year, you can add Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins to that list. Ms. Garzizino had been all but dancing up and down Connecticut Avenue naked trying to get those pumps fixed and replaced! And one would think that Senators Lieberman and Collins would investigate the homeland security of our Homeland Security! I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s pretty damn obvious that defective pumps don’t keep our homeland safe!
You know…I’m not an engineer and I make no claim to be. I am, however, smart enough to understand the vital connections between levies, pumps, and water to understand that you need to keep those walls and pumps functioning properly and you need to replace defective pumps when they don’t work! So why haven’t Lieberman and Collins been doing their constitutionally assigned job, that we the tax payers pay for, and making sure that the Homeland is protected from Hurricanes and cronies and corporations?
Hopefully, no lives will be lost this time. And hopefully the emergency mechanisms of the city, state, and federal government will function properly too. But given the situation with the faulty pumps, things don’t look good for residents of NOLA who are still rebuilding from Katrina.
NOLA residents clearly don’t want a repeat of Katrina’s slow seven day starvation adventure. Most will likely be taking their families and their pets and they’ve probably even packed some food and water and are leaving the city. They have learned the lesson. Nobody wants to see lightening strike twice.
But with a broken government in DC, beholden to corporations, lightening will always strike twice! When you have an infrastructure of corruption, cronyism, and incompetence, then it’s like flying a kite during a thunderstorm. The lightening will strike! When the government is protecting the profit margin of companies, it’s like sitting in the middle of a lake holding a metal rod… Yes, the lightening will strike twice! And when the government allows defective products to be used, it’s only logical that the end result will be….more lightening striking!
It’s too bad we have corrupt and incompetent officials in government like Bush, Cheney, Lieberman, Collins who haven’t learned their lesson or just don’t give a sh*t.
A bumper sticker I saw said it quite well, “We need a better President.” But I say we need a better government, too. And we need better governmental policies that prevent these lightening storms, or plan against them, instead of orchestrating policies that cause them.
And that is what this year’s elections are about: competence and as well as honesty.
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Reprinted in full with the author’s permission.
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An aside: Jesselyn Radack is a former MA resident who worked in Clinton’s White House and later became the ethics adviser in the Dept. of Justice in the Bush White House. Under Ashcroft’s tenure, Radack blew the whistle on torture and their cover-up.
You can read more about Jesselyn Radack at the Patriotic Truth Teller dot net.
