• Bush lands in Mobile (more on that in a moment) and MSNBC chooses that oportunity to put up an elapsed time counter ( "4 Days 4 Hours 38 Minutes") on the right hand side of the screen. Somebody there has been paying attention and has a sense of humor I'd never seen in evidence before.
• Dennis Hastert (Blob of Protoplasm-Ill) says New Orleans should be bulldozed, then says he was just talking about Federal assistance, then takes a nap, then says of course all he was trying to do was assure that we'll rebuild the bestest damn city there ever was and he was just thinking about all those poor suffering people.
• Just in case no one else has done it, I emailed the Speaker explaining that a) the City of New Orleans is actually a port of some minor importance and b) the New Madrid Fault is active, and considering the general state of earthquake preparedness and the structural integrity of buildings throughout the Midwest, if God decides to punish all the gays in Illinois Hassert will be representing a pile of bricks. Which would be fitting, I admit.
• George Nero Bush spends two days packin' up all the vacation photos and the bike helmets and makin' sure there haven't been any overnight brush emergencies. Takes a flyover of what used to be the Gulf Coast and pronounces it "devastated". Spews some platitudes from the Rose Garden. Sleeps eleven hours, spews more platitudes. Sleeps another eleven hours, wakes up "angry", decides the results are "not acceptible". Hops on Air Force One, flies to Mobile, and tells Mike Brown what a tremendous job he's doing. After hearing Bob Riley and Haley Barbour tell him what a tremendous job he's doing.
• The Astrodome is full, somehow, at half the number they said they'd take. Handicapped bathrooms are on the second floor, hot food is on the fourth floor, they're short of volunteers, and the people in last night's buses have nowhere to go. This is taking a serious toll on the pasted-on smile of the Buffy reporting from the parking lot.
• MSNBC's Lisa Daniels, subbing on the Ron Reagan Jr/ Monica Crawley show which has been All Looting Loops All The Time for four days, just cleaned the grill of Rep. Bobby Jindal, the Republican who represents suburban New Orleans.
• Breaking News: CNN reports that the cavalry has arrived (4 Days 5 Hours 20 Minutes, clock courtesy MSNBC) and Lt. Gen. Russel Honore is on the ground directing traffic. Exactly what was needed. I told my wife last night that Patton would have been there two days ago. Godspeed and good luck. And I mean it.
Two very surprising things:
ReplyDelete1) MSNBC has turned into an actual news station, and a quite good one.
2) The "left-leaning" "libertarians" of DC-based media elite are actually pushing the class-aspect of this story (Jack Shafer, for example) in a way that I, as a nanny-state socialist, am fairly pleased to see. They even got robotic Wolf Blitzer to acknowledge it.
NYTimes "Home and Garden" section hed:
A Sad Day, Too, For Architecture.
Patton would have had the city drained and cleaned by now. Thank God Bush wasn't around to fight the Germans.
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