Nothing, except to say...

While listening to the radio today on the way home from Barnstead, I heard something interesting. Rachel Maddow, who was substituting for Al Franken on his show was talking about the media coverage of the Katrina disaster. She pointed out something that I should have noticed earlier; that the correspondents for the networks covering the events in New Orleans are being radicalized before our eyes. Last night, Anderson Cooper of CNN went after Mary Landrieu after she thanked the government officials supervising the events in New Orleans. Though he himself was in Mississippi, he had seen his own share of awful things, lie a dead woman floating in the water, her body being consumed by rats as she floated. Today, while flipping through various channels, I saw Shepard Smith, that's Shepard Smith of the Fox News Channel, lambasting the government's efforts to save some of the people he saw essentially dying on the highways and bridges he was broadcasting from. We've seen terrible images, the likes of which we never see here in the United States. Maddow kept saying how there seemed to be a national question of how could this have happened, and an outrage that this could happen in the United States. Frankly, I've been asking myself the same thing.

This is probably the worst humanitarian catastrophe in America since the Dust Bowl, and the worst natural disaster since the San Francisco earthquake in 1903. The staggering incompetence shown in dealing with this has been incredible. It took days for food to reach people, days of them sitting, and some dying, in front or inside of shelters. We've seen the very epitome of desperation, people begging total strangers, through cameras, for any kind of help. Andrew Sullivan made the point that if conservatives are supposed to believe in anything, its law and order. Funding emergency services, and the armed forces are supposed to be what conservatives do. What has happened this week is gives the lie to that. Or, at the very least, gives the lie to the idea the George Bush is competent. Anyone can believe what they will about politics, about what government is for. We can all agree on one thing, government is supposed to be there for things like this, to protect the citizens of their own country from harm, to save them from disaster. There have been dozens of disasters in other countries, deadly earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, which were essentially ignored by people here. The governments of those countries often couldn't help their citizens because their nations lacked basic necessities like adequate roads or equipment. We have adequate roads and adequate equipment. The reason no one though a disaster like this could happen, that Americans would need to be bussed from one city to another as refugees, is that it shouldn't have happened. It was unfathomable.

I thought President Bush was having a bad summer before, given the case Cindy Sheehan was making against the war, a war with no end in sight, one that doesn't seem to have accomplished very much in Iraq. Now, the image of his presidency, which once was the man in the jacket throwing out the pitch at Yankee Stadium or the man standing in the rubble of the towers with firemen, has changed. Its now the image of the man who, when his country needed leadership, seemed unable to leave his vacation home. The man who looked outside his billion dollar plane to see the damage caused by nature, and the toll it was taking on the forgotten of society. The man who today, in trying, one can only suppose, to give comfort to those who have lost everything, said he couldn't wait to sit on the front porch of Trent Lott's new house (The same Trent Lott who lost his job as majority leader because he seemingly endorsed the platform of a segregationist). While tens of thousands of the poorest Americans, who have lost everything and are taking what they can to survive he said he couldn't wait to sit on the porch of the new mansion for one of America's most powerful, and richest, men. In the four years since 9/11, we've been told we were preparing for a disaster, that we were ready for anything that might come to hurt us. Obviously, that wasn't the case. We seemingly haven't learned anything about disaster response since that Tuesday. It seems to have only gotten worse.

There isn't much else to say. I'm sad, I'm tired, and I'm angry. One of America's greatest cities, the one that gave birth to jazz, the one Andrew Jackson and a band of Kentucky and Tennessee woodsmen defended in 1815, the one that gives us Mardi Gras, and the one that millions of Americans call home or who have families to call it home is under water or in a state of anarchy. Please, lets just hope things will get better this weekend.