Sidney Blumenthal Assigns Bush God-like Powers
Yesterday I went back to bed when the power went out around 8 AM. There was nowhere to go except by foot (as the electric gate wouldn't open to let the car out) and I had already been to the city (5 AM) and back on an errand. When I woke up again and fired up the computer the first thing I saw on the interweb was the New Orleans fiasco.
The one thing I do know is that I can't begin to understand the hell these people are going through. And like many other people I'm looking for reasons, or more to the point, where to point the finger for the seemingly horrid response of the government. It was then with dismay this morning that a friend of mine emailed Sidney Blumenthal's current Slate piece of crap. Sidney, like the rest of the idiot "blame Bush/America firsters," blames, you guessed it: Bush and his war on Iraq for the situation in New Orleans.
I won't give him the benefit of a link here to push up his Google rating (a quick Google search already reveals half a dozen [positive] references to his article on the first page), but if you've got this far you should know how to get there.
Sidney's slant is actually the beginning of the second wave of assaults on the Bush administration as regards to this particular natural disaster. Robert Kennedy and sundry Eurocrats, blaming Katrina on Bush's (and republicans in general) stance on global warming and the Kyoto protocol, led the first wave. The best one of the bunch is from Russell Shaw at the Huffington Post:
"Still I am wondering if those voters in Louisiana and Mississippi who helped polluter-allied Reagan win in 1980 would have found themselves fated differently under a second Carter term. If Carter came in, we could have had an alternative fuels program and tighter auto emission standards in effect by now."
Excellent, blame the victim. Actual scientists immediately debunked this claptrap in the New York Times. The 'disgusting' politics were noted by James Glassman at Tech Central Station, who also has the Times link.
I think it's abominable what is going on right now, and I blame a good part of it on the administration, but not for the reasons Sidney cites (hey, you want more? Go there and read it yourself). I also blame it squarely on the local officials who played politics with people's lives for years, as Sidney, Kennedy, Shaw and their ilk continue to do.
A point of black humor that I found in the article was Sidney's description of the catastrophe:
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead.
The humor lies in the logic: if the disaster was "biblical" in scope, I wonder that Sidney is granting Bush the power of God to have caused it, or corrected it. Maybe Sidney is buying into all that "Christian Right" stuff too.
