A Wish

Like the nation's oil reserves, our collective stockpile of disbelief must be getting low, seeing as we've used so much of it over the past week. And still I can't help doing double-takes when administration officials try to avoid explaining why they let thousands perish needlessly in Louisiana and Mississippi. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann notes with his last bit of incredulity that Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Czar, seems to think Louisiana is a city, not a state.

More importantly though, Olbermann writes,

[T]his is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological. It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

Spot on.

To President Bush, who was giddily yukking it up with a guitar when floodwaters wiped out New Orleans; to Michael Chertoff, who has excelled in nothing so much as criminally negligent cluelessness; to Michael Brown, who isn't qualified to lead a troop of Girl Scouts, much less FEMA; and to Condoleezza "shopping for shoes" Rice  — to all of these murderous, buck-passing ass clowns, and plenty of their cronies, I'd like to repeat the words that the immortal Frank Zappa once spoke to would-be censor Tipper Gore:

May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.

Comments

[Martin Owens]

Seriously, would electing Democrats have turned the hurricane back out to sea? If the likes of Hilary Clinton and Al Gore had held office, would their explanations and comments have been any more convincing or useful? No matter who is supposedly in charge, they use the same government departments, the same National Guard.

I don't mean to be callous here, but it's no more than the facts to say that New Orleans has always been vulnerable. I remember my parents, who once lived there, saying so forty years ago : " if those levees ever break, they're in trouble down there."

But at the same time, the total yardage of levees in the city of New Orleans is scores of miles, likely hundreds. Throughout the South, it is thousands of miles. A break anywhere threatens life and property. It's easy enough to say 'could have' and 'should have', later on, but all levees need maintenance, and there are only so many dollars and so much time available, even if you devoted the entire Federal budget to nothing else. The wrong choices were obviously made- but who can honestly say, without hindsight, that they would have done differently?

Let's face it: just as with 9/11, the first assumption was that, here in America, the worst cannot happen; God ( or the government) won't allow it. And most times,we're lucky and that assumption is right. Look at how many people stayed behind because they had ridden out other hurricanes, how many times the storms did not break the levees, how many times half-measures turned out to be enough. The consequences are terrible when we guess wrong, that's all. And whoever is President at the time, it's his fault. All of it.

But really, to talk about throwing poop on people is no more use than the ravings of those idiot preachers who claimed the storm was punishment for Mardi Gras.

[Rogier]

Martin:

Could this not be about partisan politics, you think? You've been visiting here often enough to know that I skewer to the left and to the right with about equal abandon. If I'm hitting Republicans and conservatives harder these days, it's mostly because they're in charge. Supposedly, anyway. Regardless, you should be pleased that I managed to get a dig in at that bubblehead Tipper Gore.

As for Katrina: Oh sure, levees are vulnerable, hurricanes are inevitable forces of nature, yada yada. That's not my point. My rage and frustration, like much of the country's, are focused on the RESPONSE to the disaster.

Inadequate does not begin to describe it. Inadequate does not take into account that, in front of the entire world, thousands died who didn't have to. Inadequate does not cover the unbelievable let-them-eat-cake mentality displayed by Condoleezza Rice, who caught a Broadway show first, then went shopping for thousands of dollars worth of shoes, while people in New Orleans were standing up to their necks in water and waste — hungry, dehydrated, sick, and desperate. Or that Michael Chertoff, DAYS into the crisis, insisted that people in the local Convention Center were well taken care of and that we shouldn't believe 'rumors' to the contrary. The list is endless.

Why would you give any of these flailing, incompetent halfwits, right on up to the President himself, a pass on this one? More to the point, why would *I*? This blog has always been, in part, a daily rant on the madcap follies and failures of our so-called leaders, our moral/ethical/political guardians, self-appointed or not. If ever I had reason to train my crosshairs on them, well my friend, THIS IS IT.

[Phil]

This has fuckall to do with left-and-right politics. This is taking these fuckers to task.

Since when did calling an elected official out on his mistakes count as being partisan?

[Rob D.]

This is precisely the problem with having this damn 2 party system in this country. If you rag on a Republican, you must be a bleeding heart liberal. If you rag on a Democrat, you must be a Fox-watching-neocon. Stop being partisan hacks already and think for your goddamn self.

This country is hurting from a lack of voices, especially from libertarians who could bring common sense into the frey. And I don't care how many Republicans try to win over those borderline libertarian-republicos come 2008 election time (as they do every election cycle. They're in for a rude awakening.

Freedom lovers have to unite, and break completely from the D's and R's. It's the only way politics has a chance to have significant change in this country.

[John Palubiski]

Agreed, Rob D.

There really aren't any leaders. Instead, we see the media divas singing (and off-key I might add) those I'm-not-guilty arias. It's all a question of image over substance.

Does anyone remember the ice storm that battered Canada's Québec province back in Jan 98?

I went 26 days without electricity during the coldest time of the year ( it's cold up here in Jan, believe me!) and yet survived.

Now I'm no Ted Nugent, but in my little home I had had a wood stove installed in the basement. Normally I'd use it to supplement winter heating, but in '98 it became a life saver.

When it was installed my neighbours called me a hillbilly, but after about two days without power they were all knocking at my door looking to warm their little toes!

Now they all have one.

Seeings the times we live in, it,s always best to think about at least minimal disaster provisions based on the demands of your regional climate and on the extremes it may present.

Never mind the gov't! During the ice storm all the politicians ever did was fly over in helicopters and gush on about "how dark it was down there"!

Except, of course, for the flicker of flames in my little wood stove.

[Martin Owens]

I repeat, what good does it do to excoriate, let's say, Ms Rice? What would you have her do? Enter a nunnery and sit in sackcloth and ashes? Commit seppuku? Go down there with a mop? She like millions of the rest of us cannot effectively do anything directly for New Orleans ( or Mississippi or Alabama, who are suffering just as badly but much more stoically). If she had gone down there at once she would only have added to the confusion, for VIPS are just one more worry to the folks trying to pull everything together. Staying out of the way and running a few errands was probably a sensible thing to for the Secretary to do. And if Madeline Albright were still Secretary of State, it would have been the same situation.

The Superdome as a refuge center made perfect sense- as long as the levees held. When they failed, the place obviously became a trap, along with the rest of the city. The situation became horrible because the New Orleans cops would not let anyone leave. Ditto the Convention center. Perhaps they
should have turned them all loose to forage in the ruined city for three days. But once again, that's hindsight.

Of course Chertoff gets the blame- he is supposed to run Homeland security, which is supposed to prevent things like this from happening. Easy enough to say, " hey look, he should've sent water and food earlier". But he doesn't know unless someone tells him. TV? The little screen has been known to distort, and you cannot run things based on what you might or might not see on TV.

Then , too, just look at the goddamned size of the devastated area. 90,000 square miles, as big as the UK. With no roads, water, sewer , power, phones or radio circuits. All gone. New Orleans is where the cameras are, but there are millions of people as bad or worse off, even now. Diabetics with no insulin, asthmatics with no inhalers, heart patients who were iffy even in good times, cancer patients.... not to mention hundreds of thousands of people who were hurt, who are hungry and thirsty and overheated and overworked and lost and scared out of their minds. And while the help may be arriving now- really, what was there to work with, then? A whole lot of needs and emergencies have gotten lost in the flood here. No pun intended.

Which is why I refuse to jump on anybody for this. The Mayor of New Orleans and his aldermen said some pretty wild things, and unhelpful in my view, and they, too could likely have done more to prepare... but who can blame them for losing their cool when the world as they know it is ending?

Mistakes have surely been made, wrong decisions and bad calls, and there will unquestionably be others. Bureacracy is stupid by nature. The stupidity is sometimes contagious.

But for my part I refuse to believe that anyone is acting in bad faith here, so long as they keep trying to do something. And, so again, why talk about throwing poop? Quite enough of that floating around already. Literally.

[Shaunna]

I saw Obermann last night, while I watched with slack-jawed amazement...

FEMA has become an ever-worsening organization the past few years. I know people who have had to deal with them in La Conchita. They call it Diaster Relief by DMV.

And it needs to change that the Red Cross can't go in without Homeland Security approval... it's been proven, it doesn't work. People die. Help needs to get there faster.