Wow, Dennis Roddy is PISSED OFF

The normally genial and soft spoken Dennis Roddy (he of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette) sounded off this Sunday on the Bush Regime and its rampant mismanagement of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He began with this:

As New Orleans took on the atmospherics of a John Carpenter movie, George W. Bush, a man reluctant to distinguish between desperation and lawlessness, much less make the connection between the two, proved at last he is his father's son.

Thirteen years earlier George Bush the Elder saw a black population mired in poverty and alienation riot after a California jury blithely acquitted the posse of Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King half to death. His response was to deliver an indignant speech about law and order, proving only that he was blind to the nuances of plain justice.

Last week, with the poor stranded on rooftops, then huddled, hungry and abandoned inside a leaking stadium and a sweltering convention center, George the Lesser watched in seeming amazement when they ran riot. First came looting born of hunger and thirst when a federal government adept at moving armies to a foreign desert for a fraudulent war proved incapable of shipping food and medicine across state lines for a flooded city.

The John Carpenter Movie, presumably, is Escape from New York and not Big Trouble in Little China or Dark Star. Though some of the social commentary in They Live! certainly strikes a chord. Roddy continued:

By week's end gunshots and rapine broke loose. Enraged and unfed victims, many too poor to reach the high ground available to wealthier New Orleans suburbanites, turned on their keepers. That is all they had -- keepers. Only someone who shows up with nourishment and medicine can be called a savior, and the saviors of the Department of Homeland Security seemed oblivious to the depth of the plight in the Delta. A reporter for National Public Radio, the administration's designated Voice of Satan, could not convince Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, the man responsible for knowing such things, that the Convention Center was a place of starvation, with human bodies discarded in open view.

Let's remember that Chertoff was originally quoted on the Today program as saying,

"The critical thing was to get people out of [New Orleans] before the disaster. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part."

Ah, compassionate conservatism. Doncha just love it?

I would hope that someone somewhere has had the intestinal fortitute to remind HSD Director Chertoff what Dennis Roddy wrote above: "...many too poor to reach the high ground available to wealthier New Orleans suburbanites..." To Chertoff, those people down in New Orleans brought it all on themselves by "choosing" "disobedience" to the order to evacuate.

Anyway, back to Roddy.

Bush the Younger? He made a statement decrying all looting, drawing no distinction between hooligans who grabbed televisions for which there was no electricity and frantic parents swiping bread from broken store windows after the fashion of Jean Valjean. Informed that gasoline had spiked to $3 a gallon, Bush, who returned home from a one-month vacation aboard a 747 jumbo jet that also transports his armored limousine, told people not to purchase gasoline unless they needed it. In a country in which mobility had just been shown to be the difference between life and death, Bush's answer was to tell people not to buy what they inevitably will need.

And the core of the piece:

Bush has shown, first in a distant land, where the corpses are foreign, and from which dead Americans can be smuggled home with photographers banned, and now, inside his own borders, that he has no grasp of how policy and outcome are interconnected. Consider his words as New Orleans swamped and its poorest and least stable population sweltered, starved and then broke into the equivalent of a prison uprising:

"We view this storm as a temporary disruption that is being addressed by the government and by the private sector." On Thursday he denounced looting and insurance fraud. Think about it: Ordinary people were so locked in anarchy and helplessness they stole food as the more venal among them stole guns and shot at aid helicopters. The president denounced insurance fraud. He might as well have weighed in on poaching while he was at it.

Although what this would have to do with those extremely soft-boiled eggs you get at Sunday brunch, I have no idea. [UPDATE: I looked it up and NOW I UNDERSTAND THE JOKE. You're way more cultured than me, Dennis Roddy!]

In any event, those last few lines sum up the callousness of the current regime. A city lies in ruins, thousands of people may be dead and the rich guys in power make sure to include a denounciation of insurance fraud.

George The Lesser, indeed. Haa! Good one.

Read the whole column. The folks at the Post-Gazette will be happy you visited. Tell 'em the 2 Political Junkies sent you.