Hurricanes aside, Bush our biggest disaster

Copyright © 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.		E-mail this story to a friend
As hundreds of people died of thirst, hunger and neglect in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, as dead bodies floated for days in the flooded streets, as thousands of survivors huddled bereft and destitute, Americans were shocked, outraged, by the callous disregard of human life by our unresponsive government. We wrote checks, sent goods, volunteered -- to honor the dead, to support the living and to take care of our own. Ten days later, President Bush announced that America can't fiscally withstand another such disaster. He spoke of cutting more social programs to pay for Katrina's destruction. He didn't talk of revoking the tax cuts he's given his "base," of killing the Senate's pending repeal of estate tax laws, of taxing the windfall profits of oil companies or of ending the war in Iraq. Yet it's hurricane season, we're at war, and we're borrowing every penny we spend. Now Hurricane Rita is in Texas and Louisiana. I have cried off and on all day, grieving. I don't know how it feels to be an evacuee fleeing another decimating storm, how it feels to be homeless with all things familiar lost to me; but I do know how frightened I am as an American citizen -- a fiscally bankrupt taxpayer with a morally bankrupt president who spins reality to suit his image, his agenda, even in the midst of carnage. With winter looming on our oil-shortening horizon, and poverty rising faster than our economic growth, Bush's careless leadership is the ongoing disaster we can't afford. Patricia Norton Augusta patnorton@gwi.net