I saw a quote from Theodore Roosevelt today:
"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
As I read this Maureen Dowd editorial about Bush's visit to New Orleans and the props and lighting effort that went into last Thursday's speech to the nation, I was struck by this paragraph:
As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.
I am reminded of how Chinese Communist Party higher-ups used to ship steel by rail from factory to factory in advance of Chairman Mao's visits, so that he wouldn't get mad about the dismal state of China's iron refineries. They would also truck around tons of rice and grains so that he would be shielded from the true disaster of his Great Leap Forward program, which killed well over 20 million people by starvation.
Such men, who command fear and command by fear, are not leaders. They are ignorant, dangerous despots.
I can't decide if this is really stupid or really cool. PocketMod is a Flash app that allows you to modularly construct a notepad/organizer which prints on a single sheet of paper. Once printed, the page is folded in such a way as to make a compact little booklet.
It looks nifty but... it seems to me to be of limited utility.
"Here's what gets me" is a brilliant write-up of this. It expresses exactly why I'm so enraged at Bush right now, with his smug jokes and "Brownie, you're doing a hell of a job" comments.
Say what you want about the mayor and governor -- those people were in pain. They saw people suffering and dying and took it as a given that it couldn't go on that way, and that if it did, government's response would be a failure. The mayor cried at the top of his lungs for help. I want to hear that Bush cried at the top of his lungs for help. I want to hear that he called every corporate hotshot he's befriended in the last twenty years and told them that if they ever wanted another invitation to the White House for dinner, they were going to pony up a fat wad of cash to the Red Cross, and they were going to do it yesterday.
I want him to have reacted like a person who happened to also be the president. I want him to have felt the same bone-deep sense of shock that I felt at the thought that this could happen in a large city, easily accessible by trucks, in a wealthy country. I want him to have gotten on the damn phone and told somebody that if there wasn't water for every person at the Superdome within eight hours, that person's head was going to roll, and he didn't care how it got done, it had better get done. I want him not to have sat around on his ass on vacation while people's children were being taken from their arms to be rescued.
I want Bush not to have spent four days dicking around while the conditions deteriorated. I want him to have acted sooner, not because it was his obligation as president and it would reflect badly on him if he didn't, but because people were dying, and everyone I know who could think of something to do did it. There were a million things he could have done besides sit around making happy speeches about how everything would be fine. The stupid comment about Trent Lott's porch doesn't infuriate me because Trent Lott can't miss his porch. He has as much right to be sad over his losses as anyone. But the lighthearted way in which Bush delivered those remarks was absolutely chilling.
I just had a realization about why "conspiracy theories" are never taken seriously. It's because they are not actually "theories", but are rather merely hypotheses to explain events that have already happened. No "conspiracy theory" explanation I have ever seen has any predictive power whatsoever, and thus it can only remain in the realm of the hypothetical. If any of the various "conspiracy hypotheses" regarding JFK, the moon landing, 9/11, and so on could actually predict things that are going to happen or evidence we have yet to uncover, then they would be elevated into "theory".
Most people are too cavalier in their use of the term "theory". I hypothesize that this is due to the poor level of science knowledge in this country, and due to the fact that hypothesis is in that rarified strata of the American lexicon known as "the four syllable words".
[from fortune... God I love fortune sometimes..]
Just a few of the perfect excuses for having some strawberry shortcake.
Pick one.
1: It's less calories than two pieces of strawberry shortcake.
2: It's cheaper than going to France.
3: It neutralizes the brownies I had yesterday.
4: Life is short.
5: It's somebody's birthday. I don't want them to celebrate alone.
6: It matches my eyes.
7: Whoever said, "Let them eat cake." must have been talking to me.
8: To punish myself for eating dessert yesterday.
9: Compensation for all the time I spend in the shower not eating.
10: Strawberry shortcake is evil. I must help rid the world of it.
11: I'm getting weak from eating all that healthy stuff.
12: It's the second anniversary of the night I ate plain broccoli.
This was on AndrewSullivan.com, and I'm reproducing the text here in full. It pretty much sums it up. I don't care who you voted for in November, the current state of events in New Orleans is inexcusable.
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"I've considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn't going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn't be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I'm probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.
But after watching what's happening in New Orleans-an American city that I've loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can't ever vote for these people again.
Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.
And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, "Right on," because some of that money's bound to fall on my head.
Well, something else would fall on my head first.
I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that's the job. We have A and B teams and I'm a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I've drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.
Here's what these people would do for me.
They would leave me there to die.
Look at the facts. There's no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it's flammable.
In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that's no choice at all.
I'm not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I'm talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can't tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they're piling up bodies in the street median.
We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.
A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, "All the people who weren't bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things."
There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they've lost everything, have no guidance, and don't want to be shot by a looter.
There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.
In the UNITED STATES.
Some people say that you can't hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, "I want you to make sure this never happens again," it was not meant to be specific to "no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss." It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we'd save the ones we could.
And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we're sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that's all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it's obvious that they can't.
Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?
No. It wouldn't. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I'd be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.
But one thing sure would have been different.
They wouldn't have had a whole week to sort it out and know what's coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, "Hey, what if..."
And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.
I've had it. I'm done. And if the other bunch of assholes can't figure out that what's important is that babies don't starve to death here (and I'm not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm's way, we'll get rid of them too. And so on.
Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one's in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor's performance, or bragging that we've sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that "we had no idea the levees would break."
Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.
No more."
Despite what you may have heard about liberals being a bunch of homo-loving, Christ-hating, potheaded punks, some of them are actually nice people. The group Made With Love By a Liberal knits clothing for people in need.
Of course, if you are a homo-loving, Christ-hating, potheaded punk, you can also get your wonderful WTF stickers here.
A timeline of the recent history of FEMA
As you read this, recall Bush's statement, "No one thought the levees would be breached." Also recall White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's statement, "Flood management has been a priority of this administration."
If they were in elementary school, we'd give them time out in the corner for lying. Since they're politicians, we call it "spin" and "damage control".