Posted on 09/11/2005 10:59:50 AM PDT by nj26
Rarely in U.N. history has the United States, the organization's chief sponsor and host, looked as awkward or vulnerable to foreign eyes as it does now.
With 170 world leaders meeting in New York this week, the Bush administration is scrambling to save lives and restore its can-do image. Hurricane Katrina has produced scenes of devastation and deprivation shocking to the rich and powerful U.S. but all too familiar elsewhere.
Televised images of fetid floodwaters in New Orleans and grim-faced U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, are greeting heads of states arriving for the U.N. General Assembly.
Bush plans a speech Wednesday, making the case for U.S.-backed initiatives that are already proving a hard sell.
Staggered by Katrina, the U.S. also faces international opposition to the war it is leading in Iraq. There is resentment, too, that Bush has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty on global warming or embrace British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal that rich nations donate foreign aid equal to 0.7 percent of their national income. The U.S. percentage is 0.16 percent, the lowest of leading industrialized nations.
Washington still has more money, military muscle and political say-so than anyone else. Yet Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are coming to New York dogged by the perception of disarray and government bumbling that gives other nations a rare glimpse of a superpower on its heels.
International offers of money, equipment and other aid have flowed since the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast two weeks ago. While grateful, the administration knows that accepting the help can feed the perception of weakness.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"They throw garbage wherever, spit on people, steal, loot, you get the picture"
And apparently defectated where they stood, which I will never understand. No notion of sanitation, no desire to avoid disease. Dig a latrine, cordon off an area for the waste, throw it out the window to float off in the flood water, burn it or SOMETHING.
Don't just wallow in it.
The NYTimes is playing Chicken Little. The only people in disarray are the dems. For the adults, life goes on.
AP posts this kind of thing as a news item, rather than the highly charged political rhetoric it is.
No author to take the heat.
Very lightweight, very chickenshirt, disingenuous
and precisely wrong.
There is movement to control the spin of this, to deny the obvious recognition that entitlement mentality and larger
Guvmint answers are fatally flawed.
N'Oleans reaps the harvest of its corruption.
****
Mr Bush should have spoken about the states unwillingness to give him the authority to act. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and wednesday, to pressure Blanko.
Politically, it would have left him very far from the mess we have now, but more importantly, the innocents
deserved to know that the Fed wasn't going to be there, and why.
There would be none of this BS spinning, racial nuttiness,
none of it.
I cannot fathom why he did not do that.
I guess having basic civics knowledge isn't a requirement for reporting on civic affairs at the AP. The President cannot ratify treaties - that is the Senate, which was unanimously on record as being opposed to the compact before Bush ever took office.
"There is resentment, too, that Bush has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty on global warming or embrace British Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposal that rich nations donate foreign aid equal to 0.7 percent of their national income. "
How can the Liberals argue on one hand we're NOT giving enough foreign then on the other hand say we're not spending enough on domestic issues like diaster relief, etc.
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