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Small Town Accountability: An Outrage Scrapbook · Sep 2, 08:54 AM
Up here in St. Lawrence County, Town of Colton, if the snow doesn’t get cleared in the winter & the roads repaired in the summer, we vote out the Highway Superintendent & give somebody else a try. Officially, the superintendents run as Republicans of Democrats, but party affiliation matters a good deal less that performance. So I wonder what Americans will do in response to reports like this:
Lacking any reliable source of information about how to proceed, residents from the flooded eastern parts of the city and stranded visitors wander westward in a state of desperation. People shout at cars, pleading for rides to anywhere, and ask each other where they’re headed. Several thousand residents forced from their homes line Convention Center Avenue, where rumor has it evacuations were set to begin. National Guard personnel say they had no immediate plans to begin evacuations from that location.While chatting with some of the National Guardsmen, another guardsman approaches and informs us that a woman is in the middle of a stroke around the corner. The guardsmen shrug. There is no emergency medical tent in the downtown area, and many people in need of medicine have no way of getting what they need, even inside the shelters. On our way into the French Quarter, a wild-eyed man flags down our car, begging us for insulin or information about where some can be found. We cannot help him. [Salon]
I have also spoken today on post here with Army pilots really pissed off that when the helicopter was shot at yesterday at the Superdome, they suspended operations. What I have been told is IT IS A MILITARY HELICOPTER AND YOU ARE PREFORMING A KIND OF MILITARY MISSION AND YOU ARE TAKING FIRE SO WHAT’S THE FUCKING PROBLEM? I heard this from pilots who have served in Iraq. They are really upset right now that it is okay to take fire to liberate Iraqis but it isn’t okay to take fire attempting to rescue and save people in your own country! [post at Daily Kos]
I don’t know if all of you have seen the footage today from the convention center in New Orleans, but it is shocking. There are dead bodies lying all over the place. People are waiting for help and the only people who’ve come in there are news crews and Harry Connick Jr. (And fuck you Michele Malkin.) It’s a living hell.The MSNNC reporter just said that he counted 82 buses lined up outside the city waiting to go in to evacuate people from the convention center but they won’t go because they’ve been told it isn’t safe.
On 9/11 we had cops and firefighters running into collapsing buildings to rescue people. Today, days after the crisis hit, I’m watching people with little babies desperate for food and water and nobody is coming in to help them. [Digby]
And in my town, if the Highway Superintendent were to announce that he hadn’t anticipated that much snow falling & what were we doing living out in the country anyway, he would not be in office very long. President Bush said the other day that “no one anticipated the levies failing & the Director of Homeland Security announced, sounding for all the world like a fat & greasy Roman senator from the late empire:
“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”
Digby sums up my accumulated outrage:
For Christ’s sake the tourists couldn’t get out either. All the rental cars were booked and the airport was closed. Lucky for them, most of them were staying in high rise hotels and they rode out the storm. And now they have someplace to go—- home. The locals who didn’t have cars aren’t quite so lucky, are they?I think Chertoff’s comment says everything we need to know about how this government viewed this catastrophe. “We told ‘em to get out; if they refused (or couldn’t) they brought this on themselves.” That’s the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. “You’re on your own, losers.”
I think Americans expect more of their government than that. That comment should be hung around the necks of these poor planning, corruption spreading, deficit spending, budget slashing, warwmongering, tax cutting assholes like a dead Louisiana pelican.
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