Flipping channels.
So, Wednesday I had to take a drive out to Ikea and at one point I'm flipping between stations - commercial on the FAN and NPR in some uninteresting segment. I happen upon Rush Limbaugh who I haven’t listened to in quite some time. The bloated, drug abusing, windbag is droning on how “This country is in trouble because of the liberals! We don’t have gasoline because the liberals won’t allow oil refineries to be built! Liberals force our country to enact all these nasty pollution standards so poor oil companies are required to make 47 different types of gasoline. Even when they are able to get into New Orleans, it’s the liberals who will stand in the way of progress. The liberals won’t let us rebuild in New Orleans anyway because the ground will be so toxic! Those damn liberals want to blame global warming...” and on and on and on.
This has the effect of making me want to put my foot through the radio (not an easy thing to do when you’re tooling along trying to keep up with everyone else going 75mph).
As I have voiced previously (and truthfully, saying it makes me feel as if I’m standing up in some twelve step meeting), I am a Republican. Yes, I would consider myself both Republican and Conservative but, I’m not seeing fetuses in satellite photos of a hurricane or thinking somehow that God has rained down his wrath in some form of divine payback (and I’ve actually seen things recently where people have the gall to suggest just such a thing). I just can’t find the gigantic reservoir of ego it takes to think somehow I may be able to keen a divine hand in a natural disaster.
I’m going to put a moratorium on the whole NOLA thing as it will be everywhere now and relief is finally just trickling in to the people. Also, I think there comes a point where being the angry old fart doesn’t do much good but, I will make one last comment about this situation to provoke some thought hopefully.
If they wanted to impeach a guy over a blowjob, what should they do to someone who was on vacation when his country needed him? If the mayor of New Orleans was smart enough to tell the people of the city they needed to evacuate on Saturday, two full days before the storm hit and the governor was doing the same, advising residents on the southern part of the state to evacuate as well, why did it take the president two full days to formulate a response to the emergency? It was an unprecedented storm which everyone KNEW was coming! It wasn’t a secret, how could the federal government have dropped the ball so badly.
It’s coming up on Friday and they’re just beginning to get help to the people. What? Does your state have to be governed by the president’s brother for the president to do his job?
2 comments:
Regarding the Fed's "slow" response to the big blow...
Considering that every year we get an alphabet's full complement of hurricanes in the southern part of the country, you'd think to Christ that somebody would come up with the clever idea to actually stockpile some emergency relief goodies in various places around the south as a permanent part of the "national hurricane relief program"...There's going to be power out and bad sanitation and no clothes and lack of drinking water and on and on. And it's going to happen every year. Why the Feds can't get their shit together and have the Guard ready to roll into town just as soon as the wind blows out is completely beyond me. They can see the goddamned storm from the satellite (it's not as if this thing wasn't the size of Texas and couldn't be found), they can predict where it's going to hit, they ought to have a pretty good notion of what's going to be needed in the wake of the storm...so wtf?
Oh. I forgot. It's the liberals who have all the national guard in Iraq. God damn liberals.
The whole situation just proves how dysfunctional the federal government can be at times. I was thinking about this the other day - on September 11th, the feds were able to totally shut down all air traffic in the country in relatively short order, shut the borders of this country off to the rest of the world but, it took them two days to realize there was a problem on the Gulf Coast?
The whole thing is so totally disingenuous, it amazes me to hear some federal officials trying to blame state and city government officials by saying they didn't ask the feds for help. Better still watching the head of FEMA on TV saying that they were unaware of the conditions at the SuperDome and the Convention Center - meanwhile people across the country and around the world could see what was happening as it was being broadcast by all the major news orgs.
Sure seems like they’re very aware of their poll numbers on a minute by minute basis. I think this is a situation where the American people have to hold the Chief Executive accountable - the whole point of being president is to show leadership, something that was sorely needed in the days leading up to Monday’s landfall and the days immediately following the event.
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