| |
| Think at your own risk. |
| Tuesday, September 06, 2005 |
| Stick a pin in Scott McClellan |
Take 1: Chubby chasing... Poor Scotty got his roly poly bottom kicked in the daily briefing today. Quick: How many ways can you rejigger the following talking point: "the time for finger pointing will come, but now is not the time for the blame game. Now is the time to meet the needs of the suffering people of the region..."?
Take 2: Fiddling and burning ... Meanwhile, President Bush has apparently learned the Caesarian maxim: "Ruler! Investigate Thyself!" So the commander in chief will personally conduct the investigation into the Katrina fiasco??? The man who can't travel without his Crawford pillow is the guy we've got to trust to figure out what went wrong while he was riding bikes and Condi was watching "Spamalot"? Great.
Take 3: Jomentum returns... Someone in the Democratic leadship please get Joe Lieberman off TV. His goofball Homeland Security reorganization contributed to this disastrous FEMA let-down...
Take 4: Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans...? Once this mess is finally under decent control, we should begin asking some hard questions about why the federal government's best response to the Gulf tragedy has been to permanently depopulate New Orleans' poorest communities by shipping the displaced to various points around the country? Is there something to be gained by emptying vast portions of that city, such that when it is rebuilt -- and it will be -- they aren't there to reclaim their stake? I hate to be suspicious and conspiratorial, and I praise the various state governments who have reached out to the displaced, but a government that would sooner board the elderly and the poor of the Gulf on Carnival cruise ships than on dispossessed military bases close to home, and that frankly failed to even notice they were dying in their city's convention center, really shouldn't be trusted to permanently change their address.
Take 6: Compassionate conservatism ... Listeners to today's Neil Boortz radio show heard the conservative brain trustee posit that the dead in New Orleans are to blame for their own fate. "The politically incorrect truth," said Boortz, "is that most of the people who were trapped in New Orleans were poor, and not by accident. ... And they responded to the hurricane with the same behavior that caused them to be poor: lack of initiative and motivation, total dependence on others ... they chose their lifestyle and they continued with that lifestyle until the end." (paraphrasing). That would be remarkable if it weren't so typical. A right wing analyst on today's noon version of "Connected" on MSNBC basically put forward the "shit happens" defense of the federal non-response. Paraphrasing again: "we're a country of 300 million people So 10,000 people die in one natural catastrophe -- these things happen." He also said it isn't the federal government's job to rescue American citizens in times of natural catastrophe. Apparently, the feds' only job is to "protect us from terrorism. ... and the truth is, we could have spent more money on hurricane protection, but that would have left less money to protect us from terrorists." Craig Crawford, also on the panel, looked stunned...
Take 7: tell it like it is... "We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. ? Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now." -- Aaron Broussard, president of New Orleans' Jefferson Parish, on Meet the Press September 5, 2005.
Take 8: the low-down... Why does the world's only superpower need handouts from abroad? The BBC reports, the readers decide.
Technorati tags:
hurricane katrina,
New Orleans, Louisiana, catastrophe |
posted by JReid @ 2:07 PM   |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
