Bush's Presence Prevents Aid

This is not an inflamatory accusing post. This is cold, hard fact. When President Bush flew in to New Orleans to survey the damage and take pictures with firefighters, he also, litterally, stopped the delivery of emergency food aid that local leaders had worked extremely hard to negotiate and deliver [in the absence of any federal aid] to their constituents.

No, I'm serious. Last Thursday, in the midst of some of the most desperate moments when hope still existed, our President nobly went to survey the damage. And in doing so, he prevented tons of emergency food delivery.

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said.

The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana five days after Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Melancon’s chief of staff, Casey O’Shea.

“We had arrangements to airlift food by helicopter to these folks, and now the food is sitting in trucks because they won’t let helicopters fly,” O’Shea said Friday afternoon.

The food was expected to be in the hands of storm survivors after the president left the devastated region Friday night, he said.

This isn't the first time that our government had put PR ahead of actual assistence. This is, in fact, their habit. The Administration treats Americans just like they treat the rest of the world: with excruciating Negligence.

In the start of the Afghanistan war following September 11th, our government made a big damn deal about airdropping 1 million packages of food to Afghanis over 3 months. The net result of this noble airdrop was that all the NGOs in the region were blocked by the Administration, and their food deliveries stifled, which equaled up to 1 million meals delivered per week. Huge percentages of these were lost to spoilage, breakage, and other problems. Not to mention that the bright yellow packages looked very similar to unexploded cluster bomb shells, leading many starving Afghanis toward horrible injury as they picked up explosives thinking they were food packets. So: of the million dropped, 300,000 were "good," having the net result of starving out Afghanistan's 4.5 million population from the food aid they were already receiving.

But it sure looks good on TV.

I hope that Americans realize that this separate-but-equal worldwide treatment of Americans is not what we signed up for.