Don't Mince Words

Hunter of Daily Kos tells us what he really thinks of those who prostitute their minds and souls to the evil, corrupt SOBs running our country:

At Blogs For Bush, which bills itself as the Whorehouse... er, "White House" of the Blogosphere, the ever effervescent Mark Noonan writes about the DeLay indictment:

...

This is not the actions of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority - it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and sieze all power for itself...it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made...

I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge - you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received.

...

Mark... may I call you Mark? I feel when someone has shown me the insides of their own rectum, we're pretty much on a first name basis... I have some words for you.

Whitewater. Rush Limbaugh. "Drug Dealer" Bill Clinton. Swift Boats.

Vince Fucking Foster.

Playing with fire, you say? Because the indictments ringing Tom DeLay finally reached up that one, final step from his ring of closest advisers to DeLay himself? Because the SEC has launched a formal investigation into the same behaviors by Bill Frist that put Martha Stewart recently in prison? Because one of the single most visible, highest profile Republican money men has been indicted for fraud, is being investigated for client shakedowns, and has his close business associates being investigated for a mob-connected murder?

What utter cowardice. What pathetic anti-American pedantry. What laughable protestation. The crimes of campaign money laundering, of fraud, of conspiracy, the violation of the laws of the nation, to be answered with stern visions of potential gunfire if Democrats have the audacity to pursue it.

...

Your party has set aflame the entire political landscape, and now, once burned, you warn sternly from the branches of a burnt-out tree about "playing with fire". You used the ashes of one of the great liberal cities of America, New York City, as war paint for your own sick, racist dreams. You shudder at a burning flag, yet are willing to snip-and-cut basic tenets of the Constitution as needed or convenient.

...

Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.

...

Step back from the edge? You poor boy, asleep in the back of the car the whole trip, finally waking up and wondering where you're at.

...

You can't even see the edge from here. You left it behind a hundred miles back.

So don't give me chest-thumping crap about civil wars, if your politicians are indicted. Don't give me visions of a lake of fire, if all those who find you loathsome refuse to suck at your teats of scientific ignorance in the name of religion, racism in the name of freedom, and corruption in the name of the New World Order.

Or, as a great playwright once put it:

"Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws being all flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it) d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

DeLay has no place left to hide from his crimes, and the poor sods who have sold their souls to this monstrous pack of traitors have no place left to hide from the truth, except in citadels built from the mortar of their own frightened denial. They want to believe that they are righteous when they are only self-righteous, that their leaders are virtuous when they are corrupt, that their beliefs are noble when they are vile, and that all their enemies are cut from the same cloth. Wish as they might, however, John Kerry is not Osama bin Laden and George Bush is not Thomas Jefferson.

I truly do believe that we can alter what is possible through perception and will. But such power comes from wisdom, and whenever someone tries to alter reality from a place of towering hubris, Truth will repay such arrogant folly many times over. They have sown the wind, and now they decry the whirlwind as partisan?

No. This is not backstabbing, revenge, or even justice. This is simple physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The madmen who have hijacked the once-noble institutions of the Republican party and the government of the United States have acted with absolute contempt for honesty. The bitter harvest is clear for all with eyes to see: the death and tragedy in Iraq, the return of the drug lords in Afghanistan, the price of blindness and neglect in what was once New Orleans, $3 a gallon gasoline, a government deficit so massive it beggars the imagination and the near-universal hatred of a world that gave us nearly universal, unconditional support a scant four years ago.

And the storm is still just now breaking.

I am saddened that so many -- a full 40 percent of the American people -- still don't want to see the truth. I can't blame them, though. It is something terrible and painful to see, like watching a beloved uncle slowly dying of a cancer he refuses to admit exists. But our Uncle Sam does have a cancer, and only by confronting him with the truth can he be saved. Joining in his denial will only prolong the pain, and if we wait too long, even that mightiest of relatives may perish.

The time to awaken is upon us. Either this country chooses to face the consequences of its leaders' actions, allowing us to begin to face their mistakes, or it will remain blind and embark on a path that ends in a nation indistinguishable from Oceania.

There's just one problem for the would-be Big Brothers of God's Own Party: there is a real resistance out here. We pay attention to facts, rescue the past from the memory hole and continue to point out inconvenient truths. The simplest and most important one is this -- they are not America, no matter how much they pretend to patriotism and decry their enemies as 'anti-American.' We are all America, and their delusional, hateful Frankenstein's monster of corporate mega-greed, xenophobic bigotry, and budding theofascism is only a tiny, insignificant portion of the legendary Melting Pot.

Most Americans would be shocked if they saw it for what it is -- their dropping poll numbers are the result of a few more coming around to the truth all the time -- and the monster is coming apart at the seams. If it weren't, would they be desperately be threatening violence like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling? Then again, for them, the sky is falling, but it's really just the ceiling of their little bubble of falsehood caving in. And really, what's one more lie among friends after so many?
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(/) Roland X
And the Truth Shall Set Us Free
(those poor bastards are on their own, though)

Rules

I've thought a lot about the strain of Republicans that we oppose -- the Cheney/Rove axis that threatens both the systems and ideals that make up America. They play the rules like the worst sort of lawyers, bending them into pretzels when convenient and breaking them whenever they can get away with it, but holding their opponents to the most minute definitions whenever it can provide them an advantage. (See Clinton, William J.) And the basic definition of this sort of Republican is simple. For them, there are no rules.

To be sure, there are guidelines. Win at all costs. Never let the marks see past your image. Spin can beat any truth if you're shameless enough and persistent enough. No slander is too foul, as long as it works. (See Kerry, John F.) Loyalty is the only important trait for office holders. Hypocrisy is a virtue. "Orwellian" is an ideal, not an insult. And finally, if you do lose, never admit you lost, pretend it never happened, and immediately go back on the attack, preferably on another flank. When it comes to the "lost" issue, there's always tomorrow.

It's easy -- too easy -- to give in to anger or despair when faced with this sort of villainy. It's like being ruled by the Legion of Doom (but I'll get to that in another post :-). They must be stopped. They must be beaten. They must be driven from power, discredited, and the memory of their administration recorded solely as a lesson for future generations of the ways evil can hide behind an innocuous face.

Yet we must adhere to a higher standard than the pseudo-cons. Most of us disagree with their actual ideology, true, but that's not what makes them so poisonous. It's their lies, incompetence, cronyism, and worst of all, their sheer willingness to turn American against American. Nothing is too low for them if Rove can use it to squeeze a few more votes out, whether in the House of Representatives or among regular people.

They used the attacks on September 11, 2001 -- the single most unifying event in American history since Pearl Harbor, its one silver lining -- and used it to club their political rivals over the head. They started an unnecessary war for a variety of reasons, but one of them was for the exact same purpose. And now, with an entire city under water and massive amounts of the deepest of red states left in disarray thanks almost entirely to their incompetence in the one area they claimed as their sole bailiwick, they decry the "blame game" while playing it for all they're worth.

J'accuse!

It is our duty as Americans to cry out at this injustice. We must speak out, resist to the best of our ability, this obscenity. I firmly believe it makes the most sense, strategically and morally, to proclaim their mendacity, greed and heartlessness at every opportunity. Find decent people and run them against the vermin that walk like men (See Hackett, Paul). Decent Republicans, I'm looking at you, too -- Democrats of conscience are working to take back our party, and yours is in greater need of you.

What we cannot, must not do, however, is allow ourselves to stoop to their level. Will it make any real difference if liberals or moderates return to power if back room deals and political payback define our governance? What good will restoring balance to government finances if health care and welfare become Democrats' ways of rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies? It may be possible to bring down Bush with a lie, or an irrelevance (yeah, the bathroom note is fun, but can you imagine impeaching him over it, even if he were to lie to Congress about it?), but what would that turn us into?

The subtitle of this blog is "proud supporter of the reality-based community" because I believe that reality is far more malleable than most believe. (I find it most ironic that the "Vulcans" of the modern Republican party have done more to undermine the concept with their hubris than the flakiest New Ager ever could.) I've seen/read The Matrix, What the Bleep Do We Know, Stranger in a Strange Land, and a variety of books on the implications of quantum physics to what we think of as a hard and unyielding universe. As a result, I have a healthy respect for those who see rules with a skeptical eye, and those who break them with style can be quite noble. After all, I look forward to a day when humanity can twist the 'rules' of reality itself into proverbial knots, making of it what we will -- who am I to denigrate the honorable rogues among us?

The thing is, honor is the key. Even if we overturn every law of physics and make a game of existence itself, there must still be some codified limits to behavior for people to get along together. If anything, rules of honor and decency are far more important than mere laws, whether of government or physics. These are the rules for which the Rovians have so much contempt, and the ones we must hold on to in spite of their outrageous flaunting of them if our victory is to mean anything.
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(/) Roland X
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fail. Think of it...always." -- Gandhi

Political Emergency Management Agency

So much for the defibrillator.

To paraphrase a friend of mine (who apparently takes exception to my giving Dubya the least amount of credit -- with good reason, it turns out), he's still trying to weasel his way out of admitting he screwed up. To quote COBRA's Baroness, "I take the responsibility, but not the blame! It's [his] fault!"

As others have pointed out (the brilliant Digby in particular), Bush has used liberal rhetoric before (anyone remember No Child Left Behind?) to cover up his fringe pseudo-conservative agenda, and he's doing it again now. If anything, the lies and greed are worse than ever. As Digby notes:

I missed the speech last night but I was on the road and tuned into KTALK, the liberal talk radio station here in LA shortly after it was over and heard Johnny Wendell, whom I usually quite like, saying that he hadn't heard a politician say anything like this in 30 years. And he thought that it was such good news that we should give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt. It just proved that the era of Republican small government conservatism was over and liberalism was back, baby!

I was confused. I had read that article in the morning, after all. Then I came home and fired up the creaky computer and saw that Karl Rove was in charge of the rebuilding effort. Ah.

Read the whole thing -- Digby quotes an article on how the reconstruction effort is already being turned into one gigantic boondoggle combining radical conservative "free-market" theology and cronyism on a $200 billion dollar scale.

Okay, so he hasn't learned anything about the effectiveness of laissez-faire policy and placing spin doctors in charge of actual organization. I mean, ye gods, Karl Rove in charge of reconstruction efforts? Karl Rove?!? Given that they called it "reconstruction" in the announcement, I imagine for Southerners, even white fundamentalist men have to be twitching while they wonder what Cheniac is really up to. (Hint: expect a lot of Halliburton employees to make suitcases out of rugs.) But hey, he must realize that we have to start paying for this stuff, right?

To quote the title of another great blog, sadly, no! Read his lips, no new taxes. No old taxes, either -- don't worry about him even slowing down on tax cuts. After all, we can't hobble our brave, can-do billionaires as they feast at the trough of federal recon...er, I mean, rush in to bring that capitalist ingenuity to making money hand over fist...um, that is, creating a Brave New City built on conservative ideology and a whole new demographic. (IOW, no blacks need apply. Unless they're rich wingnuts.)

Even Prescott "The Profiteer" Bush would blush at the shamelessness of making money on the dead and destitute of a devastated American city. The debate is over: Bush is unbelievably stupid and amazingly evil. He is the front man for the Cheney/Rove axis, the living veil for a toxic stew of domestic piracy and foreign conquest. In spite of his stupidity, on some level he is clearly aware of this. It's time for Democrats to stop pussyfooting around this trained ape and wage politics with the same intensity (albeit not with the same mendacity) the Republicans do: as the small-d democratic equivalent of total war.
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(/) Roland X
Theoden: I will not risk open war.
Aragorn: Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.

Get the Defibrillator

Bush admits to failure?!? I think my heart stopped:

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."

He even spins remorse -- "all levels of government" and "didn't fully do its job right" sound like he's trying to dodge as much of the "responsibility" as he can -- but this is still an unprecedented step for an administration that has remained unrepentant on even its most epic failures. Of course, even on 9/11 we didn't lose an entire city, so I guess this proves that even Rove has his limits.

On the other hand, the administration is rapidly running out of scapegoats. Gov. Blanco has been officially declared to have done her job properly by what may be the last genuinely nonpartisan government commission in DC, and Mayor Nagin is proving increasingly difficult to blame. Now Bush can't be held responsible for the actions of a bunch of racist cops in Gretna, aside from doing something about them at the time, but they messed up in so many other ways that I'm willing to chalk that up to the same incompetence they displayed everywhere else. Otherwise, it looks like nearly the whole mess ends up in their laps.

(And I hate being so cynical that I wonder about how much of the 'fewer deaths than expected' news is good, and how much of it is cover-up.)

So Bush actually took responsibility for something. Well, that is to be commended as far as it goes. Now that we've had some truth, let's start talking consequences. Responsibility means you deal with what you did. Maybe it's time to repeal a few of those tax breaks for Bush's super-rich buddies to pay for this mess. Or perhaps the administration should be forced to eat some crow by having someone with brains replace the cronies in FEMA and other emergency organizations. Ideally, Bush should be forced to resign by overwhelming outrage, but we're the reality-based community, so one step at a time. Besides, that would just leave us with Cheniac, which wouldn't improve matters anyway.

They're starting to sink. As Carville would say, time to throw them an anvil.
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(/) Roland X
Luthor/Brainiac amalgam: "I kill you, and then...Armageddon, right on schedule."

Gods Bless Newsweek

We rip the media so often here on the lefty side of the blogosphere (not as bad as the right's paranoid "MSM" fantasies, but still...), so I thought I should give kudos where they are richly deserved:

It takes a hurricane. It takes a catastrophe like Katrina to strip away the old evasions, hypocrisies and not-so-benign neglect. It takes the sight of the United States with a big black eye—visible around the world—to help the rest of us begin to see again. For the moment, at least, Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race and class that have escaped their attention. Does this mean a new war on poverty? No, especially with Katrina's gargantuan price tag. But this disaster may offer a chance to start a skirmish, or at least make Washington think harder about why part of the richest country on earth looks like the Third World.

It shouldn't have taken a hurricane. America should not need a disaster of Biblical proportions to wake us up from our complacency and sloth. Other than that, Newsweek -- the source of the paragraph quoted above -- nails it on the head. This is their cover story. The text of the cover?

Poverty, Race & Katrina
Lessons of a National Shame

Now that's the so-called "MSM" doing its gorram job.

We can, of course, expect the usual suspects to scream their usual slanders. "Bias!" "Liberals!" "Bush-haters!" To which I can only say the following, courtesy of Fox News:

SMITH: They won't let them walk out of the…convention center. .. they've locked them in there. The government said, "You go here, and you'll get help," or, "You go in that Superdome and you'll get help."

And they didn't get help. They got locked in there. And they watched people being killed around them. And they watched people starving. And they watched elderly people not get any medicine..

And they've set up a checkpoint. And anyone who walks up out of that city now is turned around. You are not allowed to go to Gretna, Louisiana, from New Orleans, Louisiana. Over there, there's hope. Over there, there's electricity. Over there, there is food and water. But you cannot go from there to there. The government will not allow you to do it. It's a fact.

HANNITY: All right, Shep, I want to get some perspective here, because earlier today...

SMITH: That is perspective! That is all the perspective you need!

So anyone want to tell me that Fox News is part of the liberal media? Watching the video, watching Geraldo Rivera in tears as he held up babies gone four, five, six days with little or no water, watching Shepard Smith screaming at Sean Hannity...Smith was right. That's all the perspective you need.
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(/) Roland X
"WAKE UP!" -- Rage Against The Machine

Public Service Announcement For The Bushista Resistance

I've been hoping someone would do one blog/web entry that covers all the major malfeasance of the Resident and his cronies.

http://www.bobharris.com/content/view/636/1/

Mr. Harris does it so the rest of us don't have to. I wish I could smiley this, but the reality is just too...real. Still, kudos to Bob for wading through the virtual muck to give us the rundown on the real stuff along the Gulf Coast. As he puts it:

The lies are numerous, repeated, obvious, and easily documented.

Not to mention shameless, self-serving, vile and inexcusable. I wish I had more hope that America would wake up and realize what an obscene little man is running our country, but I have a little, which is more than I've had for a while now.

It shouldn't have taken losing an entire American city, a situation in which less than ten thousand deaths is a good thing, for us to get here. And the price is too high. But that there is hope at all is a good start.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix, after all. Whattaya know.

The REAL Core of Bush Loyalty: A Paper Tiger

Gakked from Daily Kos, a poll from AP/Ipsos:

Overall, do you approve, disapprove or have mixed feelings about the way George W. Bush is handling his job as President?

Strongly Approve 20 (23)
Somewhat Approve 11 (10)
Lean Toward Approval 8 (9)
Lean Toward Disapproval 14 (13)
Somewhat Disapprove 5 (5)
Strongly Disapprove 40 (38)

Total

Approve 39 (42)
Disapprove 59 (55)

Italics theirs. Bold emphasis mine (and other boldface removed). Numbers in parentheses are from the previous poll.

Bush has dropped below 40%. He's officially tanking. The "popular wartime Preznit" BS is long since dead. (Of course, that's what you get for invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor -- I mean, Iraq after 9/11.)

More importantly, however, the strong approval rating is a mere 20%. Just half of the strong disapproval. That, my friends, is the solid, unshakeable core of the willingly deluded who continue to believe Bush anointed by God. That's it. And you can get 20% of Americans to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Hey, Democrats. You can call out the Bush Cultists for being lying, corrupt traitors. Honest. It's safe now.
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(/) Roland X
O.D. (Original Deaniac)

Now IS the Time; Now HAS To Be the Time

So the adults are in charge, huh?

With everything from death to thuggery to sexual harrassment taking place at the hands of the government, give me one good reason not to play the "blame game."

I don't give a damn if Democrats go down too, if they're partly responsible for the horror that is Lake New Orleans. Now, Governor Blanco has unquestionably been slimed in an outright lie by the administration, which claimed she did not declare a state of emergency when it is a matter of record that she did on the 26th. However, criminal negligence is criminal negligence, and one slander does not an innocent make, so I reserve judgement.

Nevertheless, the evidence is overwhelming that Bush, the DHS and FEMA failed miserably. While Bush let them eat cake and fiddled, New Orleans drowned and the entire Gulf Coast was swamped.

As the entire sane blogosphere is pointing out, no one is responsible for an act of nature. They are responsible for their preparations for it (and lack thereof), criminal negligence during, and obscene neglect bordering on manslaughter afterwards. Thousands are dead because of these soulless fools. The buck stops now, or the next time will only be worse.

(/) Roland X
Bin Laden must be laughing his evil @$$ off...

9/11 Really DID Change Everything

Just not the way we thought:

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

...

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

...

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."

...

"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found that the United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural hazards vs. $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said, "FEMA has been marginalized. . . . There is one focus and the focus is on terrorism."

...

Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent."

Emphasis mine in all cases.

The Washington Post has been absolutely amazing about this story. I highly recommend the entire article.

Kevin Drum, who (after a brief hiccup) has been the voice of moderates' outrage over this fiasco, has this to say about the article:

Here's the part I don't get — and I mean I genuinely don't get it, regardless of who's at fault here. Everyone suggests that part of the problem is that FEMA's focus was redirected toward terrorism after 9/11. In and of itself, this is neither surprising nor wrong. But the requirements to respond to a major terrorist attack on a U.S. city are largely identical to the requirements for responding to a hurricane like Katrina: food, medicine, maintenance of order, evacuation, and temporary shelter. So what are FEMA's plans for responding to, say, a large scale chemical weapon attack on Chicago? They'd have less warning than they did with Katrina and the requirements for aid would be largely similar. What would they do?

Exactly what they have done, Kevin -- spin for all they're worth, abandon the "poor, huddled masses" to whatever fate befell them, and send Halliburton in to profit off of the misery. (Oh, and Brown's predecessor as head of FEMA is now a lobbyist for Kellogg, Brown and Root. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.) With the obvious difference of being able to start wars over it instead of having to beg off on the whole "act of God" thing.

I understand the impulse to avoid "partisanship" during this terrible time, I really do. But with the Cheney administration desperately trying to pawn off responsibility for this fiasco on the Governor and Mayor (with outright lies in some cases), and with the clear and present dereliction of duty on the parts of the responsible parties (the DHS director and the head of FEMA in particular), we need to keep shouting this from the rooftops until the American people finally hear us -- because something has to be done about them before the next disaster.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix...
but before the phoenix can rise, first it must burn.

So Where's The Foreign Money?

Right here:

By Friday, offers had been received from Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, Georgia, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates.

My faith in America is shaken. Humanity in general, OTOH...after everything this country has done, especially considering these are red states...this is really heartening.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix

Because I Have To

...I'm still in shock over New Orleans.

I was born in New York. 9/11 is still the only day I have ever just not gone to work -- called in sick, sure, but I just couldn't move from my television, watching my beloved city scream in agony as a monster stabbed a poisoned blade through its heart.

This is worse.

The unimaginable, breathtaking corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration throughout all this has made me purely ill, but right now even their responsibility for FEMA's sorry state pales to near-insignificance in the face of the massive death, destruction and suffering in the city. Babies dying of dehydration. Bodies floating in the streets. Thousands of people trapped, stranded, with no food or water because no one can get their heads out of their butts long enough to help them.

Politically, this is the right response:

No whitewashes. Find out who fucked up. Republicans, Democrats, I don't care. Anyone who screwed up should be tarred and feathered.

Yes. Absolutely. We need to find out what went wrong and make sure it never happens again.

LATER.

(Though yes, there is a place for keeping the heat on the blood-sucking monsters who drained the defenses from the Big Easy to play God and pork with.)

Right now, however, anyone who can do something needs to do it. I don't care whether you're red, blue, purple or rutting chartreuse. Right now, you help and you're on the side of the angels as far as I'm concerned. The rest of us need to give whatever we can. While we're in sufficiently dire straits monetarily that we can't match the full Skippy challenge, we are donating what we can through my office, which has a matching fund. Best Buy has one as well, but given the rapidly increasing outpouring of donations, I suspect they'll hit their million dollar cap soon, whereas my office has not listed a donation cap of their own.

I'd ask everyone reading this to do what they can, but I'm certain that all of you already are.

That's what's really tearing me up, ironically enough. Emotionally, I don't know which way to jump. There is so much that is wrong and ugly about this horror. The government knew this disaster was coming. We knew. And the sheer callousness of so many...yeah, I expected a few epic cases of jerkus maximus, but the pure, unadulterated bile aimed at people too poor to get out and who had to salvage what they could to survive...there are no words. I won't call it stealing or looting when the city is all but destroyed, and what was taken was solely for survival; call it "salvage rights" and be done with it, considering that most of what was taken out of need would have been destroyed anyway. But some people have to blame anyone and everyone but their Dear Leaders, even if that means pointing the finger at dying infants and senile grandparents.

On the other hand...so much giving. So much caring. So much not caring who's in need, or how much, just seeing the need and filling it. It's a feeling I thought we lost when Mr. Uniter took a sword to this country and cleaved it in two. And maybe...just maybe...people are actually waking up to how badly our system is messed up. It's horrific that we had to lose an entire major American city for this to happen...and that even then, it might not be enough. But when Fox correspondents tell Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity to get a gorram clue, maybe there's hope after all. "The best of times, the worst of times" indeed.
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(/) Roland X
Hope is a phoenix