Open letter to President Bush

I found this on another forum site that my daughter goes to....not sure if anyone had already posted it here.
Michael Moore's open letter to the president



Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Vacation is Over... an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush


Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina
and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted.
Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do
you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot.
Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could
really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do
like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to
begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of
Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then
but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there
were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this
storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody
tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know
how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to
and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying
to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps.
Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was
over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you
specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New
Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them
that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there
weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you
had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING
DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was
moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds
as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the
disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand
on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to
use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out.
Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this
would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter
and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all
their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a
hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that
stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30
percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had
no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean,
it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving
white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race
has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army
helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

 

another wonderfull segment from Mr. Moore!

I only wish he'd replace Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes.
no offense andy.

 

hehehe, that is bloody well said.

 

How sad.. MM jumps onto the predictable and the unjustified band wagon of the masses.. keep swingin' with opinionated biased unfounded opinion of the 'common man'.. Heck don't do any real investigating heavens no.. this kind of crap [though with a slight point - nobodys perfect] is prety ridiculous .. MM you should have put the 'race issue' at the top of your agenda/letter.. thats a 'hum dinger'.

 

I don't see how anyone can shoot down much said in that letter at all. Bush DID stay on vacation after it hit, Bush DID NOT send in enough support even days after it happened. It is all the truth.

 

I understand there is a grain of truth within MM 'open letter' thats how he could even write this in the first place.. though given everything is falable it would not have been hard to consruct any kinda of letter of this kind.. whatever occured .


Take this information for what it is worth and note how much came too pass..by investigating and posting the actual reality.. rather than some persons 'open letter'.. I am just concerned by MM past history of twisting information and taking elements out of context..and sometimes just making stuff up for conveniance of his own agenda [e.g 9/11 speaches cut and pasted together].

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9134533/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9228086/?CM=050905_katrinaOnScene&CE=linkTopNews
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/30/AR2005083000945.html

The actual response and timeline of the responses, has been hijacked and skewed by partys wishing to bad mouth the efforts of those involved..
Nothing is perfect and holding a inquirey about the failures is though fruitless and will not really quieten anybodys opinion, it should highlight more clearly facts of the actual reality of the crisis management.. moreso than some person with a known agenda like MM.

Hurricane hits Monday .. Bush comes back Tuesday.. and i would presume being fully aware and in contact with efforts on the ground in between [pointed out in one of the links].. Him being on 'vacation' is supposed to equate him not being aware or not starting anything towards the effort till he came back on Tuesday.. wich is nonsense.. Should he have been at 'home' and waited till the storm/hurricane passed and then gone on vacation ?.. maybe he should have been in new orleans filling sand bags on Sunday morning.. i apologise for being sarcastic, but the whole 'why on vacation' is a old tried and tested debacle of a point, noboby can really defend.. as it is a un winnable moral hurdle [damned on all sides by not being able to be in two places at once].

 

This thread was made 8-20-05, before the hurricane even hit Louisiana & Mississippi.
http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112550

 

everybody fucked up......

I mean come on, that simple

bush should have responded sooner, the mayor shouldn't have fucked up, the gov. shouldn't have fucked up etc.

but bush is the least sympathetic, and he should be the most accountable because he could have overriden almost everything anyone else did wrong

that is why people blame bush

that and people hate him already

 

Matthew perhaps you should go and live in America. You seem to be a big fan of Bush.

How can anyone have any sympathy for Bush? At the very least he could have done a lot more.

 

Writing a letter about asking Bush 'what went wrong' and can we have a inquirey into events [thats going to happen] .. is fair. Not some ranting letter, jumping on the band wagon of popular opinion .. with no regard to any truths.. MM is a ass because he just distorts, lies and just deciedes to leave out anything that is in anyway bothersome to his agenda.. Thats is all i was saying..

Notice the elements he misses out, and injects his 'humour' instead.

Do you think MM is a paragon of the truth ?... and 'no , but he means well' is giving this dude more credit than he deserves imho.

It is not 'sympathy' it is getting to the truth..i appreciate more could have been done [though 'katrina' escalated in intensity quickly and at the last minute].. lots has been done and is being done [we should remember that] .

e.g of some distortion:
fiction:
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could
really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do
like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to
begin with?

Reality:
http://www.ngb.army.mil/news/story.asp?id=1748
http://www.ngb.army.mil/features/katrina/

 

No Matt, that would be the Bush administration. Too busy playing arselicking apologist (and obviously too entrenched in ideological sycophantry) to keep up with repeatedly exposed reality, obviously.

 

What do you think of Michael Moore ?.

 

Thanks [sarcasm] for just doing [to a degree] what i dislike about MM.. Forget everything else i say.. just pick out the point you wish to throw criticism at.

I am not being a apologist:
With out me pointing out something within hs letter and showing my point.. then it is not worth me saying anything about his letter [is it]. Show me if i am misguided about the part of the letter i highlighted [you seem to think i won't listen when in fact i will/and do].

 

I think he's a satirist who has made some effort in his own way to bring certain aspects of this administration's roster of lies, secrecy, duplicities and treasons - otherwise well known to the relative minority who research such matters regularly - to the broader, more mentally slothful general public. Nothing more, nothing less.

You however seem ever ready to side without question with all the (once again well known, ideologically-complicit) corporate media pundits who have routinely smeared him and misrepresented the points he has made to serve corporate media's ongoing complicity with abuses of Federal office.

Since you never demonstrate any interest in checking the backgrounds and agendas of those you toss out as "proof", its unsurprising that you time and again miss the truth you claim to seek.

 

Satirist ?? mm whatever... i have read and watched his output , when he is saying something like this it lets any valid points he makes down. This letter is the worst of him. innuendo, mis-representation the works.

Don't start with all that.. keep it to ther point, show me that i am misguided [like i asked] .. Not the usual that you can trot out whenever you please, as pointed as you may think your being.. your not actually addressing what i said [in total].

what is misguided about this:
e.g of some distortion:
fiction:
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could
really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do
like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to
begin with?

Reality:
http://www.ngb.army.mil/news/story.asp?id=1748
http://www.ngb.army.mil/features/katrina/Today 10:50 AM

Erm like you do.. bastions of ther truth your sources are.. i suppose you think. Anyway , don't wish to get in another pissing match with you....So believe what you want about how i interprete information. I aint never gonna change your mind.

 

Firstly those links wont open on my machine so for whatever inexplicable reason I cant see them to comment. I can however point out that the military as an institution is controlled and well documentedly so by the Pentagon whose history of lies and propaganda are quite empirically verifiable.

I can also point out to you the fact that what Moore says is not a lie as the Guard has indeed been forced in massive numbers to serve in Iraq and afghanistan which was never their mandate in the first place. Youd do well to read more than truncated military spin to educate yourself on that score.

If you find links that work ill be more than happy to comment on the articles in question. Else you might copy paste them for all to see here.

 

Katrina hit sunday night into early monday morning. Bush stayed on vacation the whole day. A good leader would at least leave right away to try and coordinate something helpful.

In the words of Bill Maher- It almost makes me miss the days when Bush only sat around for 7 minutes.

 

Bush and Moore are BOTH liars.

Anyone get a load of Babs Bush going on about how being in the superdome for days and getting raped and such was "good for em?"

 

Can't say i have... i read she said this though .. [seems a bit like our Prince Phillip] a possibly well meaning idiot..

Mrs. Bush, after touring the Astrodome complex in Houston on Monday, said: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." She commented during a radio interview with the American Public Media program "Marketplace."
McClellan, at the White House briefing, said: "I think she was making a personal observation on some of the comments that people were making that she was running into. ... But what we're focused on is helping these people who are in need."

Asked if Bush agreed with his mother, McClellan said: "I think that the observation is based on someone or some people that were talking to her that were in need of a lot of assistance, people that have gone through a lot of trauma and been through a very difficult and trying time. And all of a sudden, they are now getting great help in the state of Texas from some of the shelters."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090701515.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0509070253sep07,1,6154573.column?coll=chi-news-nav&ctrack=1&cset=true