Former NYT Reporter Cheers Hurricane Katrina Book as 'Powerful Indictment' of U.S. Under Bush
Former Times reporter turned blogger Timothy Egan on August 16 used a book review as an excuse to slam former President Bush and cheer a new non-fiction tome about Hurricane Katrina. He applauded "Zeitoun" as "a more powerful indictment of America's dystopia" duringBush's presidency "than any number of well-written polemics." Egan, reviewing the book by Dave Eggers for the Sunday Times,hyped the look at a Syrian man and his family's ordeal during the hurricane:
In the end, as mentioned, "Zeitoun" is a more powerful indictment of America's dystopia in the Bush era than any number of well-written polemics. That is in large part because Eggers has gotten so close to his subjects, going back and forth between Syria and America, crosscutting to flesh out the family and their story.
Explaining the story of what Abdulrahman Zeitoun went through in August of 2005 (mistaken for a terrorist, the subject of the book was thrown in prison in the aftermath of Katrina), Egan extrapolated this example in order to rant against President Bush:
The Bush war on terror had come home. FEMA, once a model of government disaster response, is in this account a band of paramilitary thugs, seeing everything through the dark lens of counterterrorism. Zeitoun was Syrian-American and loose in New Orleans. That's all the authorities needed to know.
Egan, who writes the Outpost column for the Times' website, has developed quite a history of frothing rage against conservatives. On March 4, 2009, he trashed Rush Limbaugh as a "sweaty, swollen man" and a "clown."
