We've been deluged in the past day with stories of military ships sitting off the coast with beds and food and water and medical supplies, stories of cities and states around the country that tried to help but were rejected or delayed by Bush, stories of volunteers with vital skills being told to stay away. I pray some major media outlet does a breakdown SOON of all these miscues directly attributable to Bush and his bureaucrats. (And I don't care if the governor of Louisiana is tripped up too; Bush is working so hard to paint her the villain, I tend to resist, but there's no reason to think she didn't screw up too.)
Here's the latest absurdity: hundreds of doctors and paramedics ready to help and being kept away by a sea of red tape.
Among the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital, developed with millions of tax dollars for just such emergencies, marooned in rural Mississippi.Eight days in and the incompetence and misery is still staggering.
"The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he said.
