I have absolutely refused up until now to blog about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Seriously, I have shut the TV off because the real horror wasn’t the fact that there was this horrific storm that claimed lives and livelihoods en masse — rather, it’s the fact that Americans lay dying in one of the most accessible cities in the country due to our government’s proclaimed inability to actually enter the city for a week.
It’s been said before, and I’m saying it here — I saw a faster response to the Tsunami in Asia. ASIA!!! We could haul ass over there and create public service announcements and send volunteers halfway across the world but we couldn’t get the slack-jawed imbecile of a president on a plane or a truck or what the fuck EVER any sooner than we did?
If this were Boston or Georgetown, D.C., or fucking Crawford, Texas, you can bet your sweet ass that your tax dollars would have been hard at work saving your fellow (affluent) Americans. In this day and age of instant communications and prosperity, I am appalled at the images I am seeing on my television. Fuck Tom Ridge and his stupid terror-alert system too. Had this been a terrorist attack, what would have been different in the response? Huh? I’m waiting. Other than exchanging the floods for fires, what would our country have done differently, if anything?
I was reading Editor & Publisher yesterday and thank god I was at home, because I spit out my Diet Pepsi straight at my screen when I came across this article.
I’ll spare you the click-through:
Barbara Bush — the former first lady, not the dipshit first daughter, although you would expect this kind of stupidity from one of those “Twins Gone Wild” — toured the Houston Astrodome, where hurricane survivors, after a week of wandering the streets, were dumped because they had nowhere else to go. And the old, crusty bitch had the AUDACITY to muse that “they were underprivileged anyway, so this (arrangement of being camped out in Houston) is working very well for them.” Read the rest of this entry »