[Mb-civic] Where's Dick Cheney? - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Where's Dick Cheney?

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  September 7, 2005

AS IF THE antebellum antics of Senator Trent Lott and President Bush 
were not enough, the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina can be 
measured even more profoundly by the disappearance of Vice President 
Dick Cheney.

Lott is the senator who romanticized himself right out of the Senate 
majority leadership by praising the late Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 
run for president on a segregationist platform. Lott was one of those 
people who lost his Gulf Coast home to Katrina. That brought Lott no 
closer to understanding the human misery in Katrina's wake.

While New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was pleading in expletives for help 
from the White House and predicting that thousands of lives would be 
washed away, Lott had the gall to say, ''I am pleased with the federal 
government response."

This was matched by Bush's hop-skip-and-a-jump over the misery last 
Friday. The White House website features photos of Bush hugging black 
victims of Katrina. But Bush did not have the time, as presidents and 
their advance teams often do so artfully, to humanize the disaster by 
naming a family or unsung individuals for either heroic service or 
optimism for rebuilding their neighborhoods. The only victim he cited by 
name in stops in Mobile, New Orleans, and Biloxi was . . . Trent Lott!

''Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house 
-- there's going to be a fantastic house," Bush said in Mobile. ''And 
I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

This Bush said to laughter. The only things missing were mint juleps.

Now Cheney is missing in action. For five years now, you could measure 
how seriously Bush took issues of great magnitude by how deeply Cheney 
was involved. It was Cheney who ran Bush's super-secretive energy task 
force. When Bush wanted a drummer to pound the false connection between 
Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11 into the heads of middle America, Cheney 
responded on the speech circuit and Sunday talk shows, as he himself 
likes to say, ''big time."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/07/wheres_dick_cheney/
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