Gee, Maybe We Should Adopt Their Emergency Management System Along with Their Health Care System

Gotta love those Canadians.

A Canadian search-and-rescue team reached a flooded New Orleans suburb to help save trapped residents five days before the U.S. military, a Louisiana state senator said on Wednesday.

The Canadians beat both the Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. disaster response department, to St. Bernard Parish east of New Orleans, where flood waters are still 8 feet deep in places...

The stricken parish of 68,000 people was largely ignored by U.S. authorities who scrambled to get aid to New Orleans, a few miles (km) away. Boasso said residents of the outlying parishes had to mount their own rescue and relief efforts when Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29.

Astounding, and quite telling of the degree to which this administration has destroyed FEMA.

"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

Can Someone Please Explain Something to Me?

What in the world does Condoleezza Rice mean? From a Salon piece by Sidney Blumenthal:

A week after the hurricane, Rice mounted the pulpit at a black church in Whistler, Ala. "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time," she preached, "if we just wait."

What idea, in the name of all that is holy and all that is unholy, is she trying to communicate?

And I'm not talking about the tautology itself, which leads to the conclusion that if we wait forever, he'll never come, so in order to make him come, we should simply stop waiting. I'm talking about the Lord Jesus Christ coming on time...to do what?

Oh! The Compassion! The Compassion!

So let's recap. Last week, as Hurricane Katrina hit and then the levees broke in New Orleans, creating the worst natural disaster in American history, we know the following to be true:

Chimpie ate cake and played guitar.

Condoleezza Rice purchased Ferragamo shoes costing more than $3000 pair and had a woman physically tossed from the store when challenged about her priorities.

Donald Rumsfeld took in a baseball game.

Dick Cheney shopped for a mansion along Chesapeake Bay.

Thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands died for want of government assistance in the disaster.

Aren't you glad the Republicans are in charge? I know Osama sure is.

Chimpie's Unreality Tour

The most fucked-up thing you can imagine Bush doing is central to his agenda for hurricane relief: photo-ops with captive firemen. Read it at Daily Kos.

He is the Tiberius for the 21st Century. It's so sick and yet so consistent with this administration's contempt for the citizens of this country.

Chimpie Knew, Chimpie Fiddled, Chimpie Killed

This report from the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) reveals that Bush was well aware that Katrina was going to be devastating. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, was so worried that he did everything he could to raise the alarm.

On Saturday night, Mayfield was so worried about Hurricane Katrina that he called the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi and the mayor of New Orleans. On Sunday, he even talked about the force of Katrina during a video conference call to President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Bush knew, he fucking KNEW! And then he went to California and Arizona to push his goddamned illegal war and eat cake with John "Chimpie's Whore" McCain.

Disgusting. Horrible. Criminal.

Thousands in New York, thousands in Iraq, and now thousands on the Gulf Coast, and Chimpie has to answer for them all.

Impeach! Indict! Convict! Imprison!

When Films Freak Me Out

So I related in the previous post that I just watched Costa-Gavras' Z. In the film, one of the key things that tips a prosecutor off to the "talking points from above" perjury going on during his investigation is when three different people describe someone jumping onto a small truck in the same exact terms: "Lithe and quick like a tiger." And here in Wonkette, what do I read tonight?

Saw your post about Chertoff saying NOLA dodged a bullet...Gen Myers just said the same at the Pentagon briefing, referencing newspaper reports.

"Dodged a bullet," eh? And didn't FEMA directory "Brownie" used the same phrase? As was once written in a spy novel I read somewhere, once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; the third time is enemy action.

It sure has a stink like Rovian orthodoxy, doesn't it?

Is It Time to Lose Hope?

As expected, the Rove spin machine is at redline, doing whatever is necessary to maintain power in the hands of the Chimpie regime, doing it without shame, without care or thought of the damage it may do to the people or to the republic. When a gang of criminals and liars seizes control and discovers that the field of "journalism" is largely neutered by its own timidity, they have no reason to believe that they cannot get away with malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups yet again and again.

They escaped any accountability for 9/11.

They escaped any accountability for the debacle in Iraq and the lies that got us there.

They escaped any accountability for out a CIA agent in time of war (excepting the Hail Mary pass of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation)

And now they are escaping accountability for a national disaster that occurred nearly FOUR YEARS after the disaster that was supposed to wake us up to how unprepared we were.

I watched the 1968 Costa-Gavras film Z last night and it gave me shivers for in the end, good and right and justice do not triumph because those who opposed the coming of a fascist police state kept playing by the rules, using the courts and hoping for the probing of a free press to keep the truth front and center. But in the face of ruthless, shameless, and unprincipled gangsters who have learned how to play to the stupid, the willfully ignorant, the fanatically religious, and the selfishness of wealthy traitors to democracy, the rules are meaningless, and they fear only force.

If Chimpie and his fucking scumbag cronies get away again, you can kiss this country goodbye. If the people have become so numbed or timid or fooled by Chimpie's lies, then they don't deserve the hope that once survived even a civil war and two world wars. They will have acquiesed to the worst kind of tyranny, imposed not by force but by lies and bluster, lies and bluster embraced as some kind of emblematic American-ness that signals our exceptionalism, but which will prove only exceptional in the scale of the tragedy that will befall this nation.

The shreds of hope grow even more tattered, stretched, and thin.