"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it"
--George W Bush (2001)
"One of the biggest weaknesses we had during Hurricane Katrina is it wasn't clear who was the top authority."
"The president and the governor were going back and forth. . . . In Cuba you don't have that problem. The government says, 'This is what we're doing, these are the resources we are going to deploy, ' and it pretty much happens."
--C. Ray Nagin (2009)
A few years back I started my own collection of Nagin/Bush parallels which I would share on the Yellow Blog from time to time. In 2006, one day after the much-celebrated "Chocolate City" speech I wrote,
There are some striking similarities between the two men. Both came to politics from the "business world". Bush ran a series of cushy family connected oil exploration ventures into the ground before becoming a useful political puppet of arms dealers and energy companies. Nagin ran Cox cable in New Orleans (as Schroeder puts it in comments to this YRHT post, "How tough a "business executive" do you have to be to work for a massive monopoly that just collects checks for a ridiculously overpriced service?") before becoming a useful political puppet of the city's white aristocracy. Both men are prone to making bewilderingly stupid statements when allowed to speak extemporaneously. Both men can appear rather surly when challenged on these statements.
I like to link back to that post as often as possible because it contains one of my prouder achievements in graphic design which I will haul back out of mothballs for you below.
That Nagin, who during the Gustav fiasco, presumed he could lie to citizens, force them from their homes, and then stage their return according to a shadowy "tier" system based on a bizarre prioritization of political and economic elites, would express such an overt affinity for totalitarian rule should surprise no one.
Update: More from Dambala
No comments:
Post a Comment