The Blame Game
Waste of human space Scott McClellan in today's press gaggle:
MR. McCLELLAN: The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later. The time for helping people in the region is now.No time for blame. That is unless you are Kathleen Blanco, female Democratic governor of Louisiana and obvious goat for BushCo. as the crack disaster management team whose sole mission is to save Preznit Arabian Horse Fluffer's ass goes to work. In that case a "senior Bush official" is running around telling everyone who will listen that Blanco did not declare a state of emergency and therefore no federal help was forthcoming. Had professional water carriers Newsweek and the Washington Post bothered to -- oh, I don't know, check the fucking State of Louisiana website -- they would've discovered she did so on August 26, 2005.
No time for blame. That is unless you are Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who had the audacity to speak out against BushCo. indifference and inefficiency in the wake of the storm. Monday morning quarterback, New Orleans evacuation expert and GOP bootlick Lou Dobbs goes to work and lays the blame at Nagin's feet, because of course, as Mayor of New Orleans, Nagin had the resources to instantly get three hundred thousand people out of the city and didn't use them. Oh and then there was that $71 million in levee reconstruction that Nagin slashed to pay for his war in Iraq.
Right. No time for blame. That is unless you were one of the people who "chose" to stay behind, and created so many problems for poor FEMA. So says United States Senatorial Embarrassment Rick Santorum, running for re-election in 2006 on the all-idiot ticket, who thinks anyone so lazy and irresponsible should be fined:
I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.You know what? I guess I would have been a lazy, irresponsible FEMA problem, because if the choice had been staying behind with my dogs or abandoning them that would've been me on a rooftop with three enormous poodles. That's why that link is over on the sidebar -- I won't even criticize FEMA for refusing to take people out of New Orleans unless they abandon their pets and their policy of putting people first, but given that choice I would tough it out with my dogs and share their fate. Both the Humane Society and the PetSmart charities are going in and helping to rescue people FEMA won't evacuate because they won't abandon their pets, as well as take care of the untold number of animals who have been abandoned and left to die.
So let's hope Senator Santorum's anal cavity is large enough to accommodate that fine, 'cos that's where he is welcome to put it, IMHO.
Right now rumor has it that FEMA is preparing for as many as 40,000 dead. I really do not think people in this country are prepared for those kind of numbers. I think people are only paying half attention to this and still have faith in the government that even though there may have been a few gaffs, they would not have let that many people die.
Meanwhile, Michael Chertoff thinks Louisiana is a city and Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) thinks it is roughly the size of Europe.
Christ you have to be stupid to be in the GOP.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 9/06/2005 08:07:00 PM
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