Black and white and wet all over

by Jimmy Breslin

This is a review of the performance of George W. Bush in tight times in this nation. It might explain the single solitary most catastrophic collapse of American government in all of our times. Mark ye well. This was the week when we turned a major American city into Haiti, and racism put its hand out and started to choke a nation, and it may not let go.

With the water coming from the sky and the bottom of the sea, driving with such ferocity that a major American city, New Orleans, followed its face into the water, George W. Bush was at North Island in Coronado, Calif., speaking to a blindingly white audience of 9,000 sailors in uniform.

At the hour, blacks were drowning in New Orleans. Blacks pushed through water that was up to their chests and was thick with the rawest sewage of a major city. Blacks were on rooftops begging to live. Wherever cameras swept, the only thing that was white was a towel being waved by a black woman begging for help, while the tiny black legs of a baby dangled from her shoulder.

Bush was in white Coronado to speak to a military audience on the anniversary of V-J Day.

Get those sailors in their whites clapping.

He barely seemed to understand there was a hurricane for the first three days. He was in Coronado, outside San Diego, and in his speech, he managed to mention New Orleans, by saying that people should not return to their homes until rescue crews could do their work.

Nobody had to be told not to return to their homes because they don't have homes to return to, and no bus fare to go anywhere.

He then told Americans to send donations to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. How marvelous! His administration sends billions and billions of tax money to his personal war in Iraq to shoot up Fallujah for the third or fourth time since he started the war with his lies, and now he wants everybody to go out on the street and give forty dollars to hurricane charity.

Bush's style is to be nowhere if things that carry a bit of fear happen. During Vietnam, he kept all dental appointments.

For the World Trade Center attack, he first froze in a classroom in Florida. Then he flew off in his plane for long hours.

Three days later, he got to New York where a flunkie placed a retired firefighter, Bob Beckwith from Long Island, alongside him atop a truck. Then Bush called out a football dressing room speech over a bullhorn.

This week, he spoke in Coronado with the carrier Ronald Reagan parked in the background. This was his sixth visit to San Diego as president.

In May 2003 Bush landed on the carrier Abraham Lincoln in the waters off San Diego. He wore a green flight suit, with a helmet under his arm. Why shouldn't he look like this? He was an American warrior. He changed into a business suit and spoke in front of a banner proclaiming, "Mission Accomplished."

There have been nearly 1,800 bodies in boxes returned from Iraq since then.

Friday, showing up on the fifth day of a national tragedy, Bush made a little humorous aside about the times he was in New Orleans celebrating too much. Beautiful! If he tried to walk fifty yards he could have tripped over somebody's dead black grandmother under a blanket.

How do you like it? How do you like having a president who at a time like this reminisces about getting drunk in New Orleans? White boy with Daddy's money roaring at Mardi Gras in a town black for the rest of the year.

If whites were in trouble in New Orleans, trust that his government would have been there early and the aid massive.

This racism, which is at the bottom of everything in America, makes it only natural for Bush and his people to talk about turning to Rudolph Giuliani to save New Orleans as he supposedly saved New York after the World Trade Center attack.

In New York, Giuliani did nothing but go on television. That's all he did and all he ever can do. Beautiful! There are television cameras in New Orleans. And just as Bush, Giuliani doesn't want many blacks near him. If more than two blacks entered City Hall, he called for snipers. Giuliani doesn't even have a show black like Condoleezza Rice, who bought shoes in Ferragamo in Manhattan this week.

Bush got found out this week and he needs his own rescue. Assure Giuliani that he could run for president if he does the job. As New York found, he can do nothing good about anything. That doesn't matter. Without somebody in front, Bush stands there, uncovered, without an American flag draped around him, as the most incompetent president we've ever had.