Katha Pollitt Quotes
Do not change horses in mid stream unless horse lies to you and the stream is on fire.
She was referring to the Administration of George W. Bush who had justified his Iraq War policies on intelligence claims that were false. The initial war effort was very successful, but the occupation was very poorly managed and there were many American and allied casualties—the stream on fire. Bush apologists claim that the President had been given faulty information by the CIA and he had no intention of misleading the American people.
Katha Pollitt, Political Writer, Virginity or Death, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Elements of the Army lied to the family of the dead soldier and the media, and then tried to cover up the lies. Abazaid is one of the few government high officials who was candid about his agency’s failure.
Bush’s administration was notorious for appointing wealthy young people who were ideologically consonant with Bush and not very experienced or competent themselves. Most of them were not very intellectual or well-read or well trained and had few of any accomplishments. From FEMA to the occupation of Iraq, there were massive failures of management and administrative competence and this hurt the reputation of the administration as much as Bush’s poor policy decision. See {624062} for an example.
Unlike terrorism and natural disasters like earthquakes, a hurricane is known about a week in advance and can be tracked as it makes landfall. So his view was that the prime failure of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security occurred the week earlier. In addition a few weeks before Katrina, Leibersbach lead a delegation of State Homeland Security Directors to meet with Secretary Chertoff of Homeland Security. Their message was that the reorganization of DHS has so downgraded FEMA that the nation’s capacity to deal with national disaster had been diminished as a result of the reorganizations.
President George W. Bush, to justify the invasion of Iraq had told the public that the Iraqi regime was developing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, and had participated in the September 11 attack on the United States by assisting Al Qaeda. It turned out that these statements were false. The administration claimed that their error was well intentioned and the result of faulty intelligence. Opponents claimed that the administration officials knew that they were exaggerating and had pressured the intelligence agencies to create intelligence conclusions that supported their story.
Incredibly, most of the administration’s appointees to handle the occupation after the Iraq War invasion were chosen for their ideological conformity to George W. Bush and the neoconservatives rather than their experience at anything much less governance or Arab culture. Almost none spoke Arabic, almost none had ever studied the Arab World, much less traveled in the Middle East. Strikingly, almost none even prepared themselves by studying the history, sociology or economics of the region, and few knew anything about Islamic culture.
In 2002, President George W. Bush, determined to invade Iraq and bring democracy to the Muslim Middle East, reported that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and were very close to a nuclear bomb. They had even used biological weapons against Iran and the Kurdish minority in Iraq. The president claimed that the evidence was incontrovertible and removed those generals who questioned the wisdom of an Iraq invasion and besmirched the character and patriotism of those civilian officials and figures who questioned the evidence or its sources. After the invasion, it turned out that there were not only no stockpiles of WMD but there was no capability to manufacture WMD as had existed before the Gulf War. Bush claimed he was misled by the CIA and other intelligence operatives. It turned out that the Vice President and other administration officials only examined the intelligence which supported their justification for war.
At the time Walker made this statement George W. Bush was in the 6th year of his troubled presidency. He was not a strong leader and was generally believed by all but his most loyal supporters to have not told the truth to the American people and many people thought that he and his administration had deliberately lied about many things – especially the Iraq war causes belli. Bush claimed that he had been misled by bad intelligence and that his failure to tell the truth was inadvertent.
Emanuel argued that when the nation faced a crisis of one kind or another, and the administration had to take steps to cope with the crisis or ameliorate it, the time is often opportune to get some of their legislative program passed or reform areas that have been resistant.
Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues from a left-leaning perspective, including abortion, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty.
