Bill Clinton has criticized Our Leader Bush for his response to Katrina on Sunday's "This Week". Your job is to determine why. Is this an attempt to help heal the Bush administration, with perhaps another Bush appearance in which he'll shovel out even more money? Surely, Clinton wouldn't turn on his new best friends in the Bush Family, so something else must be up.
Thus spake Bubba, per AFP:
"If we really wanted to do it right, we would have had lots of buses lined up to take them out"...
He agreed that some responsibility for this lay with the local and state authorities, but pointed the finger, without naming him, at the former director of [FEMA]...
"We"? As in Nagin and Blanco?
Oddly enough, the NYT omits the bus part:
"It's like when they issued the evacuation order... That affects poor people differently. A lot of them in New Orleans didn't have cars. A lot of them who had cars had kinfolk they had to take care of. They didn't have cars, so they couldn't take them out."
"This is a matter of public policy... And whether it's race-based or not, if you give your tax cuts to the rich and hope everything works out all right, and poverty goes up and it disproportionately affects black and brown people, that's a consequence of the action made. That's what they did in the 80's; that's what they've done in this decade. In the middle, we had a different policy."
Evacuation would seem to be a local issue, no? Perhaps Clinton should have been asked about the welfare mindset and whether that played a part in people staying in place. Note also that some people never heard about the evacuation order. Once again, Bush can't be in all places at all times.
While not using the name of Michael D. Brown, the FEMA director who resigned last Monday after criticism of his performance in the Katrina disaster, Mr. Clinton praised the performance of his FEMA director, James Lee Witt, and said Mr. Witt had been especially sensitive to the needs of low-income people because "both of us came out of environments with a disproportionate number of poor people."