Wednesday, September 28, 2005

thugs

Lots of fun events recently. Not the least of which is Tom Delay being indicted for something or other…Woo and Hoo in succession! He is as awful a person as exists anywhere and I hope he is repeatedly tortured and sodomized in a comfortable white collar prison. Of course a Texas jury will probably let him off for being a good Christian man and then go looking for more dark skinned thugs to ritually kill.

But I just read he’s resigned as Majority Leader! I’ve been coincidentally listening to the They Might Be Giants song “Chess Piece Face” in which a cheerfully malevolent voice keeps repeating the phrase “Hammer Down, Hammer Down”.

And get a load of that Michael “There are people in the Superdome?” Brown guy, defending himself before a mostly Republican Congressional committee (Nancy Pelosi is rather foolishly boycotting it for some reason) talking about how he was an ubercompetent selfless prince of a public official during Katrina and how he heroically shuffled papers in the eye of the storm. We’re used to seeing this kind of thing from Bush minions, but my breath was actually taken away by reading his insistence that absolutely nothing went wrong on the federal level. His insistence that the “federal government is not a first responder” staggers me. To a MASSIVE HURRICANE? Yes, I know the mayor and the governor were not exactly flawless in their response (um, it’s Louisiana) to this thing, but I’m a little clueless as to when it was decided that MASSIVE HURRICANES were municipal events. I mean this event did not occur in the city limits of New Orleans. Lots of other towns and cities in the gulf coast were destroyed. And people were trapped behind. Why is no one talking about THEIR mayors? Or the Republican (actually former chairman of the Republican party if I’m not mistaken) By the way, the state and local officials DID execute, according to Time magazine, (one of them old fashioned print publications) a pre-existing evacuation plan which coordinated traffic on three different state highways to create an escape route. 80% of New Orleans’ population got out in twenty four hours. Which is frankly amazing. And that was the state and local officials on their own, with absolutely zero help from DC. Was it really so GODDAMN much to ask to have them maybe take care of that other twenty percent that got trapped?

But, Mr. Brown solemnly informs us, evacuation is not FEMA’s job. Law enforcement is not FEMA’s job. Providing food and water to thousands of trapped, starving American citizens is not FEMA’s job. (Or the military’s, which does that sort of thing all the time in Afghanistan and Iraq) What exactly, one might rhetorically ask, IS FEMA’s job? Punk, if you think those papers are going to shuffle themselves, you should shut your mouth, step aside and let the grownups do what they need to do.

Maybe the Nuremberg defendants should have ditched the "following orders" defense and isntead, high mindedly refused to play the Blame Game.

To their everlasting credit, the mostly GOP Congresscritters tore his foul entrails apart.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped FEMA from rehiring Brown as a six figure salary “consultant”. Guess you can’t keep a good Bush crony down. What sage counsel will he be providing them with? “Don’t strain yourselves too much, boys. Life’s too short to work so hard.”

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