More Bluster from the Disaster Area

Now that the mercenaries are in control, rather than God's undiluted will, George W Bush has paid his first visit to New Orleans since the hurricane struck. Presumably he was incentivised to this act of charity by the resignation of Michael Brown, the director of the federal emergency management agency which, when the emergency arrived, didn't quite manage.

Of course, the resignation was entirely Brown's decision. No doubt it will do his health good and will enable him to spend more time with his family. Possibly not least, it will "give the beleaguered agency a chance to refocus on the rescue and recovery effort". It appears that, under Brown's leadership, the agency was focused on something else. In a statement, Brown said he had told the president that it was important for him, Brown, to leave "to avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission of Fema". This certainly seems like the correct choice. If the director of an agency is distracting the agency from its ongoing mission, it certainly seems like a good idea that the director should be maximally opportunified to find alternative employment. That certainly seems reasonable.

As one might expect, Bush himself knows as much about the resignation as he did about the relief effort. During his one-day tour of the region after the disaster, Bush told Brown he was doing "a heck of a job"; a little later, when the job began to translate into a heck of a haemorrhage in the popularity ratings, Brown was called to Washington DC, where he subsequently made his very own, doubtless correct, decision to resign. Bush, however, was too busy to hear Brown's noble words about avoiding distraction from the ongoing: "I have been working," he told reporters. "I can't comment on something that you may know more about than I do."

There are some things about which George W Bush knows more than the rest of us, however. One of these is the behaviour of coastguard choppers; it appears that, as many suspected, Bush was not working while the coastguard choppers were pulling people off roofs. "When those coastguard choppers ... were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the colour of a person's skin." The storm did not discriminate, said Bush, and neither would the recovery effort. Indeed, it would be foolish to deny the very high probability that wealthy blacks who could get out of New Orleans are receiving virtually the same level of service as wealthy whites.

Bush also took the opportunity to plug the performance of his friends from Blackwater, the mercenary group which has been guarding the palaces of the mighty during the late unpleasantness. The idea that the Middle East quagmire had hindered the federal response to the New Orleans quagmire was "preposterous", he said. "We've got plenty of troops to do both," he said. Let nobody doubt: America can shoot terrorists with one hand and looters with the other, and still have a little something left over for Iran. Gung ho.