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Rant about the Abandoned Gulf Coast
Mark, in your enthusiasm to regurgitate RNC talking points you repeat the same stupid mistakes that sent evacuees to Charleston, WV but put Charleston, SC on alert to receive them. (Only 400 miles and a matter of prepared reception away).Louisiana is a state, with a governor who asked for Federal assistance 8/26/05 (how much warning did Brown need to get help in? Depends on whether or not it's an election year, I guess.).
Possibly, of course, you mean mayor of New Orleans-whose entire city infrastructure was flooded when the levees gave way and was reduced to using interviews with news anchors to try to speed up the resources he'd been promised. It's also possible you have him confused with the President of Jefferson Parish who had his own chilling tale of abandonment to relate.
I understand that you're in a wretchedly uncomfortable position defending government by political malice and it's a reflex to try to smear political opponents. Rove and Atwater taught you well. You shill like Kyra Phillips on crank.
I hope, for your sake, that this carelessness is a sign that your heart's not completely in this lizard brain cut-and-paste reflex. That the bodies of Americans who died of dehydration, starvation, or lack of medical care in the wake of a storm whose devastation had been both predicted and gamed by the very federal agencies that failed the people of the Gulf Coast so miserably have shocked you into being slightly off your game, and possibly more humanly accessible than usual.
It is in that hope that I make the following suggestion.
Before you type or say one more statement blaming local or state officials for the exacerbated devastation I want you to go find yourself a mirror, and answer these questions truthfully, out loud, to your own face in the mirror.
1. Who stayed to face the storm, the floods and urban hell to try to stem the complete civic breakdown?
Mayor Ray Nagin, President Aaron Broussard, Governor Kathleen Blanco, and countless other municipal and state officials all along the Gulf Coast.
2. Who continued vacationing, went golfing, sought out photo ops clowning with a cake and a guitar?
George W Bush.
3. Who delayed sending relief in for two days after the storm and claimed not to know there were people dying while he made his way from microphone to camera to microphone until he was informed by the press reporting on the ground?
Michael Brown
4. Who claimed that the federal and military sources had performed "magnificently" while the very old, the very young, and the physically infirm were left to defend themselves against armed gangs who were murdering, raping, and looting?
Michael Chertoff.
READ it out loud. Look at the pictures of the abandoned dead and imagine them as your neighbors in Wherever, USA.
Then, tell me how this is all made up by the political enemies of a pampered gladhanding political figurehead who was anointed by central casting rather than any accomplishment of his own.
BTW, any errors of fact in this comment belong to me. Unlike you, I write my own material.
