Reply #43: Bush DID send aid the next day...

[johnclif]

...it just takes a while for it to get there.

The USS Abraham Lincoln spent all day (Jan 1) off the coast of Indonesia ferrying supplies to afflicted areas and surveying the region for damage, etc. That ship was in Japan last week. It can't be picked up and dropped down, so someone got it moving very quickly just after the tsunami hit to ensure it could get to where it is as quickly as it did.

Re the airbase, the US has been flying in supplies for days and US and Australian military personnel have been organizing them and getting them ready to distribute throughout the region once helicopters arrived. They're there now, and stuff is starting to happen.

We don't gain any converts to Democratic causes by slandering the people (the military, our daughters and sons, our husbands and wives, our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers) who are out there delivering this aid, working in unbearable conditions (AP reports that the airbase workers are living in the mud, being chewed on by insects -- they have no living facilities there, and living on MREs).

The people at USAID aren't Bush appointees, they're career civil servants who really want to do a good job (and I bet most of them voted for Kerry). They got there as soon as they possibly could, surveyed the region, and reported back to Washington on what they found. If only 10,000 people had been killed (as first reported), then a moderate response was warranted. As the week went on and we discovered that over 120,000 people were killed, the response has increased tenfold (from $35 million to $350 million, plus resources like ships and aircraft and thousands of US personnel). Do you think those Kerry-supporting USAID workers would intentionally harm the tsunami survivors to make Bush look bad? Do you want them asking for way more money than they really thought they needed? Do you want our government spending $500 million where $50 million would have been sufficient (in the original estimate of 10,000 dead)?

Give the devil his due. You may disagree with many of Bush's policies, just as Republicans disagreed with many of Clinton's policies, but Bush is no more the AntiChrist than Clinton was. It was wrong for Republicans to demonize Clinton and accuse him of the sleaziest motives, and it's wrong for us to do the same to Bush.