Just as University at Buffalo students were settling in for the first semester and the shit was hitting the fan this past week in New Orleans, my favorite President and Texan, George W. Bush was having a reg’lar ol’ hoedown of a vacation on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. After a couple of days of round-the-clock coverage on all the major news outlets, Dubya was forced to cut his annual August holiday short in a late, but highly publicized response to as he puts it, “one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history.”

But the questions that beg to be asked about this whole situation should be obvious: What the fuck was Bush doing in those weeks leading up to Hurricane Katrina? Why wasn’t there any plan to avoid the destruction of New Orleans?

Karl Rove’s spin machine has been in overdrive painting the mass devastation as a accident that couldn’t have been avoided, while the official White House spokesman Scott McClellan says of the Bush camp that “flood control has been a priority of this administration since Day One.” Mr. President, I’m calling shenanigans.

One need only look back to four years ago, when, in an eerie parallel to today, Bush was also having an extended Texas fiesta while Armageddon was raining down on the Eastern seaboard. Remember that whole 9/11 commission thing? You know, the one where Condoleezza Rice testified that the Bush administration had no prior knowledge of any terrorist plot on America, even though they received a document on August 6, 2001 titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US.”

So basically, in the weeks and months leading up to September 11, 2001, Bush was prancing around his ranch in a cowboy hat and boots while George Tenet, the former director of the CIA and relic of the Clinton administration was screaming at anyone who would listen about this Saudi dude who was just itching to fuck our shit up (Which poses the age old question: if a high ranking official raises a fuss and there’s no one in Washington to hear it, is it an emergency?). Long story short, a few weeks later, all of those reports that Bush had been neglecting while he was rustling cattle and felling trees came back to bite him in the ass.

But Chris, you say, he’s just lazy, that doesn’t make 9/11 his fault. And that was a terrorist attack—what the hell does it have to with Hurricane Katrina? Well, lots actually. As you may remember, we’ve been having this little skirmish over in Iraq for the last two and a half years; a conflict that as of September 1 has cost us not only 1,883 American lives, but also countless billions of dollars and a military infrastructure spread thinner than Lindsay Lohan’s tabloid photos this summer.

After massive flooding in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA, an initiative that was basically designed to stop New Orleans from becoming part of the Gulf of Mexico through the systematic construction and repairs on levees and pumps by the Army Corps of Engineers. So why then could the city be, by most accounts, uninhabitable for years, without full recovery for several decades, if ever? Well, my friends, much like his gross negligence of the Al-Qaeda situation in 2001, Bush ignored the problem by cutting more than 44 percent out of the SELA budget since 2001, including an 80 percent cut in 2004, as reported by Sidney Blumenthal in a recent Salon.com article. I’ll give you one guess where that money went (Hint: it starts with an I and ends with raq). As a result, the unfinished and shabby levees burst quickly, creating a Sea World-like environment out of New Orleans that cannot be drained fast enough with the outdated pipes.

So if you’ll excuse my skepticism over the Bush administration’s insistence that they’ve been all over the New Orleans situation since Day One, I’ll just sit quietly and wait until they hold a commission over its handling and Dubya serves up another plate of Rice.