George,

I am extremely angry and sad, but not surprised, at the total incompetence of Bush and company in response to the devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi. I grieve for the city of my mother's family. If there were any questions that Bush is an empty suit who is in way over his head, the flood waters of Katrina washed away any doubt. With his handlers away on vacation, he looked like a deer in headlights, but only after remaining on vacation two days into the disaster, attended a fundraiser in California, and made it to a couple of photo ops. His initial comments about the tragedy were so inappropriate and off key that I was even embarrassed for him.

Without wunderkind Rove to wind him up and tell him what to say, the man was helpless to know how to respond. That he has never experienced adversity, and has had everything handed to him by his father and his cronies, leaves him tone deaf to the poor, the displaced, and the sick and dying. For a man who loves to flaunt his Christianity as a sop to the religious far right, I guess he was absent on the day they talked about Jesus calling us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and shelter the homeless.

So how did he fail us? Let us count a few of the ways.

Appoint a political crony to head FEMA whose previous experience was as director of the Arabian Horse Breeders' Association. What was his disaster-response experience? None. He was the college roommate of another Bush crony, Joe Allbaugh. But you gotta love Bush's loyalty to his friends. Who could forget those words of inspiration from the President's mouth last week: "Good job, Brownie" after the man failed to get food or water to the evacuees for four days. He allowed 48 hours for 1000 FEMA personnel to reach the Katrina death zone and proposed allowing one week for another 1000 FEMA personnel to reach the crippled area.

Cut the FEMA budget to the bone and deny funding to shore up the levees around New Orleans for 4 years in a row.

Accept no responsibility for the failure to respond in a timely fashion and attempt to shift blame to state and local authorities. Whatever happened to, "The buck stops here?" Harry Truman must be rolling over in his grave.

Engage in the coordinated GOP technique of sliming your critics in a process now known as "Swift Boating." Put the White House spin machine in high gear, including the far right radio talking heads, to rewrite the history of Katrina and Bush's pathetic failures.

Who says the apple doesn't fall from the tree? As President Bush faced criticism over his response to Hurricane Katrina, his mother declared it a success for evacuees who "were underprivileged anyway," saying on Monday that many of the poor people she had seen while touring a Houston relocation site were better off than before the storm hit. Never mind that they were crowded into the Astrodome like cattle, having been forced out of their flooded homes with no possessions by Katrina's waters.

I could go on and on recounting the failures, the miscues, the incompetence, the ineptitude, and the sheer callousness of Bush and company. But by now, the images on television have brought home to all of us a tragedy of immeasurable proportion made worse by the fools now occupying the executive branch of government.

We should all be deeply ashamed that this man is President of the United States.

Jeffrey Fracher (electronic mail, September 8, 2005)