Bush slaps down Louisiana plan, then accuses Louisiana of having no plan

Yesterday, on Al Franken's Air America radio show, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu said that if George W. Bush doesn't like the Baker Plan, then the least he can do is suggest an alternative, rather than just saying "no, no, no, and no."

But, Bush says, the widely supported (by both parties) Baker Plan is unacceptable, and according to Bush:

Folks in Congress will want to spend money based upon a specific strategy. We've got to get comfortable with how to proceed. The plan for Louisiana hasn't come forward yet.

Pardon me, but it has come forward not once, but twice. When Congressman Richard Baker met some opposition to his widely praised bill, he brought it forward again, with the message that he was willing to drop the bond purchase aspect of it if he could get it passed. The likelihood of passage was high, but on Tuesday, Bush announced he was against it.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, offended by Bush's announcement that the state has no plan, says that the $6.2 billion in block grants which Bush is calling sufficent would help one in ten of people whose houses were damaged by flooding during Hurricane Katrina, and would ignore economic development and infrastructure repair.

Though a few members of Congress continue to blame New Orleanians for property damage over which they had no control, most have expressed a desire to get on with helping the city and the entire Gulf Coast recover from a tragedy which was caused, in part, by a federal agency, and made much worse by another federal agency.

In this latest version of Bush's continuing portrayal of the Red Queen, Louisiana is blamed for presenting a plan, then blamed for not presenting one. Meanwhile, no one seems to care that Halliburton, on whose behalf we invaded Iraq, has "misplaced" $9 billion, and that the U.S. budget has been wrecked by an expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars for a fake war.