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Bush cares about Kanye’s claims
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 4 November 2010
Former US president George W Bush has said that the lowest point of his low-point-heavy eight years in charge of the world’s most powerful nation was when Kanye West accused him of not caring about black people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
In fact, this was more gutting for the former Prez and warlord, it seems, than the fact 1500 people died on his watch because of woeful mismanagement by Federal authorities in Louisiana before and immediately after the hurricane struck. Go Kanye.
Bush was widely criticised for his government’s response to the natural disaster which flooded New Orleans in 2005, hitting the city’s poorest, mainly black, communities hardest. It was during a televised fundraiser for the victims of the disaster that Kanye West claimed that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”.
In his new memoir, ‘Decision Points’, Bush writes: “Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust. I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low”.
Speaking to Matt Lauer on NBC (the same network that aired the fundraiser where Kanye dissed the President), Bush added: “He called me a racist … I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say: ‘I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business’. It’s another thing to say: ‘This man’s a racist’. I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency … My record was strong, I felt, when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And it was a disgusting moment”.
