By Grace Acosta
CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour is, in my opinion, one of the bravest and most astute women on the planet. She travels to dangerous, squalid and forgotten corners of the globe, often to investigate the human misery attendant with government apathy and mismanagement. She has been the voice for literally millions of the voiceless worldwide, for people who are too poor, too starving, too uneducated or too hated to speak for themselves.
Three weeks ago, Amanpour broadcast from Louisiana, USA.
In a way, it makes perfect sense. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and while former FEMA Director Michael Brown - or “Brownie,” as President Bush affectionately calls him - was being congratulated for doing “a heck of a job,” the area surrounding the city’s convention center was turning into Haiti. Neglected, angry, resourceless people resorted to violence and despair en masse. You couldn’t stage a more quintessential backdrop for an Amanpour report.
Albeit tardy, Bush issued his mea culpa on behalf of the federal government for its inept response to this national disaster. I suppose we should all be jumping up and down, because, like extemporaneous speech, admission of miscalculation is not Bush’s forte. However, the “buck stops here” address came only after reporters had already undergone two weeks of being admonished by virtually all government representatives for being churlish and opportunistic, i.e., playing the “blame game.” Funny, but it looked to me like those courageous journalists — who reached hard-hit areas before authorities even started asking for directions — were simply investigating the situation and asking all the right questions.
Catchphrase responses, such as “There will be plenty of time later to ask those questions, but now is not the time,” bounced around the airwaves like racquetballs. My personal favorite, “We’re here to look forward, not backward,” reminded me of Mark McGwire’s statement to Congress about illegal steroid use in professional baseball - but at least McGwire had the decency to look pitifully guilty and therefore lost credibility with his audience.
This isn’t the first time the Bush administration has surprised me in its choices of whom to commend and what to ignore. I don’t believe, for example, that George “Slam-Dunk” Tenet and Paul Bremer deserved the Medal of Freedom for their roles in pre- and post-war Iraq. Alberto Gonzalez should not have been elevated to attorney general, nor does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld deserve to keep his job, in light of what both had argued with regard to the rules of the Geneva Convention and the subsequent Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. I believe Karl Rove did maliciously leak the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, and that White House correspondent/male escort Jeff Gannon’s authorized press pass is suspicious, but that no one will be penalized for either breach of security.
Even now, while professing commitment to the victims of Katrina, our seemingly benighted leadership has awarded no-bid contracts to, among others, a subsidiary of Halliburton. At the same time, it has rescinded any legal obligation for those corporations to pay the prevailing wage to their workers — those self-same victims of Katrina it supposedly cares so deeply about.
That kind of logic just doesn’t add up for me. We need more accountable, transparent leadership. We need our government to honor truth. In fact, maybe what we need is Christiane Amanpour planted right on the White House lawn.
