Month: September 2005

As Gandalf once said, “It’s the final breath before the plunge…the board is set, the pieces are moving.” Yup, it’s time for Chapter Seventeen of The Promised King, in which we have…the final breath before the plunge.

This post is being kept at the top of this page by the miracle of TimeStamp Technology. Keep scrolling down as new content appears throughout the day. (Aside from the forthcoming Sentential Links post, I’m going to try to avoid the subject of Hurricane Katrina and my anger at the response today.)

UPDATE: I’m going to postpone the Sunday Burst of Weirdness and the Image of the Week until Monday.

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I’ve seen this in a lot of places; what you do is grab the Top 100 pop music songs of the year you graduated high school from this site and do the following:

a) bold the songs you like;
b) strike the ones you hate;
c) underline your favorite(s);
d) and ignore the ones you don’t remember/don’t care about.

Well, OK, then. Luckily, Sean graduated the same year that I did (1989), so I can just crib the master list from him.

One problem I run into with things like this is that I have an awful memory when it comes to songs and song titles. I don’t know how many times someone’s mentioned some song to me in casual conversation, to which I have to respond that I haven’t a clue, only to later hear that very song and realize that I know it quite well but just never knew its name. So some of the songs I ignore here, I probably know (and likely hate, given that I remember pop music in 1989 mostly succumbing to some kind of inherent desire to demonstrate that Ted Sturgeon was lowballing it when he coined his famous Law). Anyway, the list:

1. Look Away, Chicago (Don’t remember it, but I don’t recall ever liking a Chicago song, ever.)
2. My Prerogative, Bobby Brown
3. Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Poison (I learned a few weeks ago that Poison is still performing. Jee-bus.)
4. Straight Up, Paula Abdul
5. Miss You Much, Janet Jackson
6. Cold Hearted, Paula Abdul
7. Wind Beneath My Wings, Bette Midler (Treacle. And so was the movie Beaches, which is where I heard this.)
8. Girl You Know Its True, Milli Vanilli (Bwwaaa-haaa-hahahaha!)
9. Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird, Will To Power
10. Giving You The Best That I Got, Anita Baker
11. Right Here Waiting, Richard Marx (Soft spot here. This was the song for the first time I ever asked a girl to dance. Strictly platonic, since she had a boyfriend, but still, a nice memory. Now I wonder whatever happened to her.)
12. Waiting For A Star To Fall, Boy Meets Girl
13. Lost In Your Eyes, Debbie Gibson (If it’s the song I’m thinking of, it sucked. And if it wasn’t, it probably still sucked.)
14. Don’t Wanna Lose You, Gloria Estefan
15. Heaven, Warrant (The final death-throes of the 80s hair bands, right there. Yeesh.)
16. Girl I’m Gonna Miss You, Milli Vanilli
17. The Look, Roxette 18. She Drives Me Crazy, Fine Young Cannibals
19. On Our Own, Bobby Brown
20. Two Hearts, Phil Collins (Not my favorite Phil Collins tune, but OK.)
21. Blame It On The Rain, Milli Vanilli
22. Listen To Your Heart, Roxette
23. I’ll Be There For You, Bon Jovi (Just OK, really.)
24. If You Don’t Know Me By Now, Simply Red
25. Like A Prayer, Madonna (I still love this song. The stigmata in the video was a bit much, though.)
26. I’ll Be Loving You (Forever), New Kids On The Block (Did these guys really happen?! I see they have a few other entries; just assume they’re struck through.)
27. How Can I Fall?, Breathe
28. Baby Don’t Forget My Number, Milli Vanilli
29. Toy Solider, Martika
30. Forever Your Girl, Paula Abdul
31. The Living Years, Mike and the Mechanics
32. Eternal Flame, The Bangles
33. Wild Thing, Tone Loc
34. When I See You Smile, Bad English
35. If I Could Turn Back Time, Cher
36. Buffalo Stance, Neneh Cherry
37. When I’m With You, Sheriff
38. Don’t Rush Me, Taylor Dayne
39. Born To Be My Baby, Bon Jovi
40. Good Thing, Fine Young Cannibals
41. The Lover In Me, Sheena Easton
42. Bust A Move, Young M.C.
43. Once Bitten, Twice Shy, Great White
44. Batdance, Prince (Ewwwwww! God, I hated this thing. And in summer of 1989, you couldn’t escape it.)
45. Rock On, Michael Damian
46. Real Love, Jody Watley
47. Love Shack, B-52’s (Don’t really know why. It just bugs me.)
48. Every Little Step, Bobby Brown
49. Hangin’ Tough, New Kids On The Block
50. My Heart Can’t Tell You No, Rod Stewart
51. So Alive, Love and Rockets
52. You Got It (The Right Stuff), New Kids On The Block
53. Armageddon It, Def Leppard
54. Satisfied, Richard Marx
55. Express Yourself, Madonna (Whatever happened to Madonna, anyway? The one who did great stuff way back when?)
56. I Like It, Dino
57. Soldier Of Love, Donny Osmond
58. Sowing The Seeds Of Love, Tears For Fears (Wow. I’ve just now, this second as I’m doing this list, learning that Tears For Fears actually did something after “Shout”. Who’da thunk it!)
59. Cherish, Madonna (Actually, I don’t remember this one. But I liked everything else Madonna did around then, so here it is.)
60. When The Children Cry, White Lion
61. 18 And Life, Skid Row
62. I Don’t Want Your Love, Duran Duran
63. Second Chances, .38 Special
64. The Way You Love Me, Karyn White
65. Funky Cold Medina, Tone Loc
66. In Your Room, Bangles
67. Miss You Like Crazy, Natalie Cole
68. Love Song, Cure
69. Secret Rendezvous, Karyn White
70. Angel Eyes, Jeff Healey Band
71. Patience, Guns N’ Roses (Ugh. The Summer of Axl Rose.)
72. Walk On Water, Eddie Money
73. Cover Girl, New Kids On The Block
74. Welcome To The Jungle, Guns N’ Roses (Is this the song that’s at the end of the movie version of Interview with the Vampire? It worked very well in that context. But I still hate Axl’s voice enough that it turns me off every GNR song.)
75. Shower Me With Your Love, Surface
76. Stand, R.E.M.
77. Close My Eyes Forever, Lita Ford (Wow! I haven’t thought about Lita Ford in years!)
78. All This Time, Tiffany (Wow! I haven’t thought about Tiffany in years!)
79. After All, Cher and Peter Cetera
80. Roni, Bobby Brown
81. Love In An Elevator, Aerosmith
82. Lay Your Hands On Me, Bon Jovi (I liked Bon Jovi at first, then I hated them for a while, and then I started warming to them again.)
83. The Promise, When In Rome
84. What I Am, Edie Brickell and The New Bohemians
85. I Remember Holding You, Boys Club
86. Paradise City, Guns N’ Roses
87. I Wanna Have Some Fun, Samantha Fox
88. She Wants To Dance With Me, Rick Astley
89. Dreamin’, Vanessa Williams
90. It’s No Crime, Babyface
91. Poison, Alice Cooper
92. This Time I Know It’s For Real, Donna Summer (I didn’t know Donna Summer was still doing anything of note in 1989. I liked “Last Dance” from about ten years before, though.)
93. Smooth Criminal, Michael Jackson
94. Heaven Help Me, Deon Estus
95. Rock Wit’cha, Bobby Brown
96. Thinking Of You, Sa-fire
97. What You Don’t Know, Expose
98. Surrender To Me, Ann Wilson and Robin Zander
99. The End Of The Innocence, Don Henley (Well, it’s more “meh” than something I really like, but it doesn’t make me reach for the radio dial.)
100. Keep On Movin’, Soul II Soul

Wow. Thinking back, 1989 really sucked for pop music. The hair-metal bands were pretty much done, while alt-rock and grunge had yet to really fire up. It’s a good thing that in 1989 I was pretty much focusing exclusively on classical music. (My discovery of Celtic Music was still a year away — that was in summer 1990.)

(And say, did anyone ever track down the artists who actually performed the songs that Milli-Vanilli lipsynched? It seems to me that they should have received some credit, if everyone thought M-V was good before the reality was revealed.)

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Jason started this, although I’m not sure he intended it as a freely-passed blog-meme thing. It’s a list of Very Important Cultural Things with which I have no intention of familiarizing myself. Basically, it’s a list of things I’m probably permanently close-minded about. Oh well….

Gigantic important book I won’t waste my time on:

Ulysses by James Joyce. I picked it up once in a bookstore, scanned a couple of pages, whispered “Huh-whuh?!” to myself, put it back down, and went off to look at the cookbooks instead.

Acclaimed movie I won’t pay to rent:

American Beauty. The premise just doesn’t interest me, at all.

Touchstone popular album I can’t bring myself to get into:

Whatever that mega-hit album Nirvana had back in 1991 or thereabouts was. I just never got Nirvana, and now that Cobain’s been dead ten years or more, I don’t see any urgency in doing so.

Impressive work of classical music I can ignore without guilt:

Berg’s opera Wozzeck.

Remarkable place I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit, American Version:

Las Vegas. If I were to win an expenses-paid trip there, I’d go, no question — I’m not dumb enough to pass up a free trip — but I’d never want to go there unless it was on someone else’s dime.

Remarkable place I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit, International Version:

Paris. I’m echoing Jason, here.

Hugely popular sport I’ll channel surf through every time:

I’ve already echoed Jason once in this thing (he said soccer, whose allure as a spectator sport I simply cannot imagine), so I’ll go with golf. Or auto racing.

Hmmmm. That was fun, so I think I’ll add a few more of my own!

Highly regarded television series, still airing, that I don’t bother watching:

Lost. I tried, for a while. And it really does have superb production values and is really well made. I just don’t feel like investing the time to follow a show that’s all mytharc, all the time.

Highly regarded television series, now off the air, that I didn’t bother watching:

Picket Fences. Never liked David E. Kelley’s writing.

Popular participation sport I have no interest in attempting:

Again, golf. Although the wife and I enjoy a game of minigolf now and again, if we can find a “course” that’s well-maintained and has interesting “traps”.

Classic children’s book I’d give anything to have never read:

The Yearling. God, how I hated that book.

OK, that was fun. No tagging here, just grab-and-go for the so-inclined.

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I know, folks. Maybe my current mood will subside. But then again, maybe it won’t. I can’t say for sure. Anyway, some random stuff that has me angry:

:: I don’t often agree with Craig, but he’s right here. It wasn’t just the Feds who failed New Orleans. But it wasn’t just New Orleans who failed New Orleans, either.

:: Bill O’Reilly is of the belief that a lot of people sat out Hurricane Katrina because they thought they’d be able to do some looting afterwards. Uh-huh. Keep the brilliant insight coming, Bill.

:: What do you do for people who have lost everything — their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their Bibles and phone books, everything save the very clothes they’re wearing at this very moment? Tax relief, of course! And think, if they’d been able to escape New Orleans in cars they don’t have, they’d be able to save a lot of money on their car insurance by switching to GEICO.

:: I watch George W. Bush in the process of responding to Katrina’s devastation, and I think back to the George W. Bush I watched in the process of responding to 9-11-01, and I wonder if I’m looking at the same guy or if some kind of real-life enactment of the movie Dave is taking place. My God. Bush’s speech to Congress after 9-11 was, in my opinion, utterly masterful (and I didn’t watch it on TV; I listened in the car whilst driving through Wisconsin), but here he is in Mississippi, smirking and mugging his way through things, musing about how he can’t wait to sit on Trent Lott’s new porch and commenting that he’s not looking forward to this particular trip (and this after whining last week, before Katrina, that he’s got to be able to have a normal life). Who is this guy, and do we gotta have his hand on the wheel?

:: Last week, I filled in my answers for the first five things I’d do if I suddenly became President. One of them was that I’d immediately cancel all contracts with Halliburton. Well, guess what: there would be one more contract to cancel. Guess who got the contract to clean up after Katrina!

Halliburton: is there nothing that company can’t do?

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A recurrent thought I’ve seen bandied about — and yes, I myself entertained it, before I thought more clearly — is “Why the hell didn’t they all just leave the city when they had the chance?” And as I was perusing the comments thread of the Jane Galt post I bitched about in the post preceding this one (which isn’t a bad post in itself, actually; what I was bitching about was the lame link-blocking shit), I found this brilliant nugget of wisdom, left by someone going by “kc”:

I have heard the arguement that many individuals who chose to stay did so because they had no resources to leave.

If someone said there is a million dollars waiting for you two hundred miles away on a park bench -I wonder how many people would have found the resources to get to that park bench.

This would paint more accuate picture of those who truely did not have any means of leaving.

That sums up the mindset, doesn’t it? They didn’t want to leave. They didn’t think there was enough incentive to leave. They were, literally, too stupid and lazy and slothful to leave.

This may be the single stupidest comment I have ever seen online. Anywhere, in any forum — be it blog thread, Usenet newsgroup, Internet message board, chat room, you name it. I guess to this person, all of life is a sweepstakes and the reason so many people are screwed right now in New Orleans is because they didn’t find the grand prize scintillating enough to enter the contest in the first place.

Of course, none of these people can really know what it is to be poor. Not “what it’s like”, not “what it looks like”, not “what being poor resembles” — but what being poor actually is. And I don’t know, either. But I bet I have a lot better idea than the “They were too lazy to leave and now we gotta bail ’em out” crowd.

Here’s what being poor is, at least in part. A few of the items on this list hit home for me, because they apply. But for someone who actually is poor, all of the items on this list apply, every minute of every day.

Being poor is not, for the vast majority of the people who actually are poor, a matter of choices gone awry or left turns at Albuquerque not taken. It is, for the vast majority of them, a soul-crushing reality to be endured from birth to death, from which there is almost certainly no escape, figuratively and now literally.

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A while back I noted that right-wing blogs like to block referral traffic from left-wing blogs, a practice that I find both gutless and lame. And yes, I noted that I’d find it gutless and lame if I saw a left-winger doing the same thing, but I haven’t yet.

But here comes the latest rightie to discover this infantile trick: Jane Galt (a.k.a. Megan McArdle), who apparently doesn’t want people to follow this link from Corrente. So here’s the link:

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005433.html

Or you can use this:

http://tinyurl.com/cry99

This is crap, folks. If you’re going to blog something, have the damned intestinal fortitude to accept the possibility that it’s going to get linked by folks you don’t like. If you’re not willing to do that, then maybe you should give up your pretensions to blogging and journalism and retire to a cloister to pen your missives.

UPDATE: Well, apparently, Jane Galt is quivering in fear of the massive numbers of trolls steered her way via my link, because she’s blocked my referrals, too. Jee-bus, Jane — I’m willing to bet that Asymmetrical Information has more hits in most hours than I do most days, but I guess the mosquito really can be annoying to the elephant. But really, how gutless can you get.

And further, at least cover all of your bases, Jane. You may have blocked the referral from this specific post, but you didn’t block the referral from my monthly archive — as of this writing, if you load the September page from my archives and scroll down to this post, the links work just fine. Whoops.

And, of course, when she gets round to blocking that, well then, you can just use this here link to access her post, redirecting as it does through Google. Unless, of course, Jane decides to block Google referral traffic too.

God, this crap is silly.

UPDATE II: I’ve posted instructions on how to create a Google redirect here.

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Whenever something calamitous happens, something utterly horrifying, when the terror and the initial shock start to wear off and give way to the longer-lasting emotions like melancholy, I inevitably turn to art. And almost always, I turn to literature, music, and film. It’s just the way I’m wired; it’s just the way I’ve developed over the years in which I attempt to frame the things that happen in our world, and in mine.

I do this because I think that what all artists do — even the much-disparaged “pop” artists, the ones who fuel our “popular culture” — is try to loan some perspective to the world, and find the sense behind a Universe that I’ve long held to be, at its most basic core, utterly devoid of sense. (Maybe, in this way, I’m looking in Art for whatever it is many others look for in God.) And in times like these, when an American city’s very existence is no longer a given, I look to Art for some kind of lesson to be learned, something to take into the future that might be applied next time it happens. Because it always does, sooner or later.

This morning, for no apparent reason that I can think of, I was reflecting on the movie Titanic. I wasn’t sure why. It’s not like there’s much to compare between the sinking of an ocean liner and the swath of destruction wreaked by a hurricane. But then I remembered some statements I’ve read in the last few days, and then called to mind more statements I’ve read over the last few years and beyond, and it came to me.

It was the poor people.

It was the ones who stupidly refused to leave the city, now forcing all of us hard-working taxpayers to take care of them. It was the ones who stayed behind because they figured it would mean a good opportunity afterwards to do some looting. It was the ones of whom, it was said, “Well, if they won’t leave, then at least we’ve got a big domed football stadium for them to shack up in.”

Or, as I choose to look at them, the ones who knew they were in harm’s way but who had no real way of getting out, or anyplace to go if they did. The ones who could only watch as others with transportation, destinations, medicine, and whatever else made their way to certain safety. The ones whose only choice was between one variety of total uncertainty and another variety of total uncertainty.

Kind of like people who stood at the rails of a slowly sinking ship, wondering if any of the already-too-few lifeboats would come back, and if they did, whether they’d be one of the few to get plucked from the icy water.

There’s a brief moment in Titanic, so brief that you might miss it entirely. Rose (Kate Winslet) and her fiance, Cal (Billy Zane), are in the midst of a confrontation over her increasing affair with Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), when they are interrupted by one of the ship’s stewards who, firmly but very politely in deference to the class of the passengers he’s addressing, informs them that they are to move to the boat deck because something is afoot:

STEWARD: Sir, I’ve been told to ask you to please put on your lifebelt, and come up to the boat deck.

CAL: Get out. We’re busy.

The steward persists, coming in to get the lifebelts down from the top of a dresser.

STEWARD: I’m sorry about the inconvenience, Mr. Hockley, but it’s Captain’s orders. Please dress warmly, it’s quite cold tonight. (he hands a lifebelt to Rose) Not to worry, miss, I’m sure it’s just a precaution.

CAL: This is ridiculous.

In the corridor outside the stewards are being so polite and obsequious they are conveying no sense of danger whatsoever.

We then immediately cut to this:

INT. STEERAGE BERTHING AFT

BLACKNESS. Then BANG! The door is thrown open and the lights snapped on by a steward. The Cartmell family rouses from a sound sleep.

STEWARD #2: Everybody up. Let’s go. Put your lifebelts on.

MR. CARTMELL: What’d he say?

IN THE CORRIDOR outside, another steward is going from door to door along the hall, pouncing and yelling.

STEWARD #2: Lifebelts on. Lifebelts on. Everybody up, come on. Lifebelts on…

People come out of the doors behind the steward, perplexed. In the foreground a SYRIAN WOMAN asks her husband what was said. He shrugs.

This whole exercise in contrast between how the rich and poor are treated in the face of impending doom is over in about thirty seconds. But it’s a moment I keep replaying in my mind today, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Of course, back in the early twentieth century we could be open about our contempt for the poor; we could build a ship with lifeboats enough for only fifty percent of an ocean liner’s population, and whitewash over that negligence with a “Well, we didn’t think the ship was sinkable in the first place”. Now, of course, we’re smarter and we have more wisdom bought with the blood of nearly a century’s worth of innocent people sacrificed on the altars of stupidity and poor planning and just plain not giving a shit, so we know that excuse won’t fly.

So what we have now is, in my mind, even more perverse. Now we tell the poor: “Sorry if we don’t have enough lifeboats, but it’s your own fault if you didn’t bring your own lifeboat along for the ride.”

This is why I’m a liberal, folks. It’s because I believe that we should have lifeboats.

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For the foreseeable future — but hopefully not for too long in the foreseeable future — my blogging may be scattershot, because while my computer is working fine, my monitor is not. Its image winks out randomly, and getting it to come back on literally requires picking the thing up and tilting it back and forth until the image returns. This takes longer and longer these days, and yesterday it took almost two hours of this before I could use the computer again. (No, I didn’t do this continuously. I have more of a life than that.)

A new computer monitor is, unfortunately, a big enough expense that we can’t just hop off to Circuit City today and pick up a new one. It’ll take a while. Bear with me; I’m blogging as I can. Of course, given my mood today, that might be a good thing.

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(WARNING: I’m pissed off today, folks.)

The other day, I was reading a conservative blogger who speculated on how long it would be before someone on the Left would link Hurricane Katrina with the Bush Administration’s scuttling of the Kyoto Accords. As much as I hated to admit it, I knew that this particular blogger was right — someone would be dumb enough to say that. I figured, though, it would be someone fairly obscure — a diarist over at Daily KOS, maybe, or that Ward Churchill guy. I didn’t think it would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ugh. Talk about making the wrong point at the wrong time.

Now, it may well be that global warming played a role in how strong Hurricane Katrina became, but it’s probably dead certain that had Kyoto been followed by the US to the letter, the resultant drop in CO2 emissions wouldn’t have been enough to prevent it in the short time since Kyoto, and so on. There’s a way to argue that Katrina points the way toward taking global warming more seriously, but continuing to harp on Kyoto isn’t that way at all. Besides, there may be another, more direct way in which human activity has enhanced the destruction wreaked by Katrina:

(M)any scientists say the real problem is what has been wrought on the ground in the Gulf Coast region itself. Most serious of all may be the loss of the wetlands.

Wetlands, along the edges of rivers and near the coast itself, are vital for absorbing and storing floodwaters. As such, they gave New Orleans a natural defence against storm surges.

But, according to the US Geological Survey, Louisiana has lost 5000sq km of wetland in the past seven decades – an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The draining of the wetlands to make way for roads, malls, beach communities, marinas and condominiums has also meant shrinkage of the shoreline. Louisiana loses 65sq km of coast every year.

General Robert Flowers, head of the US Army Corps of Engineers until last year, is concerned about the loss of a “natural storm protection” along Louisiana’s coast.

“With that loss of wetlands, we had to build hurricane protection. A longer-term solution to replenish wetlands will better serve us.”

I’m no knee-jerk environmentalist, but I’ve never understood the belief that we can rework so much of the Earth in our pursuit of commerce and not have an effect — sometimes a highly adverse effect — on some of the physical processes of our world and how those physical processes affect us in return.

And I’ll now be frank: our response to the situation that now exists is unacceptable, and the seeds of our poor response were sowed long ago. And when I read that President Bush said this morning that “No one expected the levees to burst”, I just want to start banging my head on my desk. In the run-up to Katrina’s landfall, nearly everything I read or watched on the news said the same thing: “Jesus, they’re in serious trouble if and when those levees burst.” But the Administration didn’t expect it.

Read this, and wonder why it is that every person in Blogistan last weekend was posting to the effects of “My God, the Gulf Coast is in for a major disaster”, while FEMA was twiddling its thumbs. Here’s the money quote, the one that has my jaw on the floor and my anger rising:

Federal officials said a hospital ship would leave from Baltimore on Friday.

I’m sitting here in Buffalo, wondering how much of tomorrow’s paycheck I can afford to give to relief agencies — and my government has a hospital ship in Baltimore whose mooring lines are still tied to the pier.

And maybe this is totally crass, but I’m angry today and I frankly don’t care right now: the people who appointed those who are making these decisions also appointed the people who are making the decisions in Iraq.

UPDATE: In comments, LCScotty writes:

Getting a ship underway isn’t like driving to work, and I suspect that the delay is likely caused by the engine room being torn apart or something like that.

That’s certainly true, so I did a little more digging and found this press release from the Navy itself, which reports on the specific ship being sent, the USNS Comfort:

The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20), based here, was activated Aug. 31 in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) efforts to provide medical support in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Comfort, one of the largest trauma facilities in the United States, is being readied quickly for her mission and is expected to get underway for the Gulf Coast by September 3.

So apparently it takes four days for this ship to be readied, from the day of activation until the time it ships out. Note that date: September 3, which isn’t tomorrow but the day after tomorrow. And then it will take the Comfort seven days (according to the article) to reach the Gulf Coast. So Comfort will not be on the scene until September 10. A lot of people can die between now and then, of course.

But imagine if Comfort had been activated, say, last Friday, when it was initially suspected that Katrina might be heading for the Gulf Coast and strengthening rapidly. Assuming the same four days to get ready, Comfort could have left port on Tuesday, and thus be halfway there already. Then, if it turns out that Katrina weakens or her impact isn’t as bad as feared, you’d have the ship stand down. This would probably cost a lot of money, obviously — but I doubt anyone would complain. It’s called planning for contingencies, which is something that frankly the Bush Administration just doesn’t do. Ever. At all.

UPDATE II: John Scalzi makes the same general points as I, but with less spittle adorning his dying monitor as he does so:

No doubt the adminstration will do what it always does when confronted with its own incompetence: Attempt to change the subject, question the motives of those who question them, and work to conceal the proof of their incompetence. I doubt it will work. This is an American city that’s sunk beneath the water, and this time the administration can’t keep the press from showing pictures of our American dead.

No, damn it, it’s not about them being Republican. A competent Republican adminstration would be like ice cream on a summer day compared to these people. There’s nothing inherently Republican or Democratic about making sure one of America’s major cities — and our major port — doesn’t get erased under the water of a nearby lake. You’re not suddenly paying over $3 for a gallon of gas (when you can find it) because George Bush is a nominal Republican. You’re paying that much because he’s completely goddamned useless, and he’s dragged the government down to his sorry level.

What really gets me is that he’s so right in that second paragraph. I can’t imagine George Bush the Elder mucking things up this badly. I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan, but he didn’t exactly surround himself with the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. This isn’t political. It’s a desire for this gang to stop screwing things up.

UPDATE III: Nick Mamatas, responding to a mastodonically stupid op-ed that argues that rebuilding NOLA might not be worth it, drives home the point that New Orleans isn’t some quaint town with great jazz, gumbo, and Mardi Gras: it’s an extremely important sea port. And, in his typically understated way, he makes another suggestion regarding the rebuilding:

Oh, and NOLA residents? Here’s something for your Christmas list to Santa. Moveable storm surge walls. Yeah, they’re not pretty like those little fire escapes, but they’ll keep your ankles dry. Enjoy your new skyline!

Maybe if you’re all very nice to the Dutch (you know, the below-sea-level people who are gaining rather than losing land) maybe they’ll build some for you.

What? Learn something from those pesky Europeans? Who does that?

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