Dissonance
The Sinking of the President
Bush and the Democrats need to catch up on their reading
by MARC COOPER

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/42/dissonance-cooper.php
Art by Karen Fiorito


I know George W. Bush doesn’t like to read very much. And now that he has announced that he will be heading up his own administration’s probe into its handling of Catastrophe Katrina, I know his time must be very tight.

Still, he might want to take an evening off and read up on the history of the killer Mexico City earthquake of September 19, 1985. The Mexican government’s outrageous bungling of that disaster was such that a full 20 years later no one knows if the death toll was 4,000, 8,000, or, as some suspect, nearly 20,000.

What we do know is that the Mexico City quake set into motion a political process that eventually led to the country’s dominant political party â€â€