I'm sure this will get swallowed by the Dkos diary machine in short order, but I just wanted to register with you my distillation of the past week. It rehashes much of the information that has been found here in the past 7 days and contains my hair-pulling disgust.
I've sent it to everyone I know and want to share with this community.
It concerns New Orleans.
I grew up in Pensacola, FL, a town about 3-4 hours east of New Orleans, and lived there for almost 24 years. Pensacola was not a small town, large enough to support a couple malls, a couple movie theaters, two mid-sized sports/entertainment venues and a self-sustaining arts community. But the town was a bit of a backwater, one in a string of funny-named towns on the 550-mile drive between New Orleans and Jacksonville.
In Pensacola, if you wanted to go to a real city, you went to New Orleans. I remember my first stroll through the Riverwalk, marveling at the Warner Brothers Store and Sharper Image, retailers you couldn't find in Pensacola. I remember getting fudge from the candy store on the upper level and watching ships sail down the Mississippi River.
I remember walking tours of the cemeteries and strolling past Anne Rice's house, visting the awe-inspiring Aquarium of the Americas and eating beignets at Cafe du Monde. There was the jazz and the street life at Jackson Square, the music selection at Tower Records, the Hard Rock Cafe, and of course the French Quarter. Everything was exciting.
I saw Phantom of the Opera with my family at the Saenger Theatre. On the same trip, my dad decided I was old enough to have a beer at dinner and bought me a Sam Adams.
New Orleans was the nearest city you could expect all the cool bands to play. I drove 3-4 hours in June 2001 to see Tortoise and Mouse on Mars at Howlin' Wolf on Peters Street. It was the best concert of my life. I got there early and had to spend an hour and half nursing a beer and playing Pacman and the bar next door. I drove home that same night after the show, and as I was fighting my fatigue, I cursed the State of Mississippi for only having rest areas at its borders.
Sure, as I got older, I came to realize that the city was always damp and soggy, not very safe, and Bourbon Street always smelled. But man it was fun and I will always remember New Orleans that way.
But I will also remember the New Orleans of this past week as the death knell of America's conservative movement. This disgrace is the final fatal indictment in a long line of incompetent bungles and wrong thinking that have infected this country for too-godamned-long.
Those who know me generally regard me as a fairly laid back guy. And while I have a quick temper, my passions are calmed as quickly as they were inflamed. But the events of the past 7 days have built inside me an intense sustained fury that has never been matched in my entire life. And it is a focused purposeful rage.
What I have experienced in the past week, and what the nation has experienced, is the utter collapse and failure of the Republican federal government. Their very philosophy lies in ruins, drowned for all to see at the bottom of Lake New Orleans. This goes beyond politics. This goes beyond partisanship. What we have seen is 100% absolutely unforgivable.
It's worse than the abstract injustice of cutting taxes for the wealthiest 1% of Americans or the allotment of lucrative no-bid contacts to Halliburton, a company that overcharges and under-performs by millions. It's worse than the bankruptcy bill numbers game that will hurt American lives. And it's even worse than sending American soldiers to fight in a trumped up war without adequate armor.
This is about people's lives and livelihoods being torn apart brutally and viscerally with an immediacy that is so obvious that it boggles the mind that the President of the United States was eating cake like Marie Antoinette and strumming a guitar like Nero while New Orleans was being destroyed.
The "President" claimed with a straight face that no one could have expected this. BULLSHIT!!! This disaster, like the attack on September 11, would have been largely preventable if Bush, Cheney and Republican congress actually gave a fuck about the citizens of America. Louisiana had been warning about this possibility for DECADES. The Army Corps of Engineers had been strengthening the levies for 5 years before Bush cut the budget for the program in 2001. New Orleans levy failure was NUMBER THREE on FEMA's worst possible American disasters list that same year. Most of the money for the levy program has systematically been diverted to Iraq so Bush can play "Desert Marauder Liberator."
Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hassert is on record saying that maybe we shouldn't rebuild the city because it might cost $25 billion, while eagerly spending the same amount in Iraq every 3 months.
Forty percent of the Louisiana National Guard is in Iraq, and the only place in the world that's worse than that is where their families are. It took them 4 days to reach the scene. The man-power and resources of the United States Army sit idle, the soldiers itching to help. But no one's given that order.
Twenty nations from around the globe have offered their assistance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and have been rebuffed, met with the response of "When we want help, we'll ask for it." This is sheer incompetence on the largest scale ever seen in the country. No, it's beyond incompetence; it is pathologically criminal negligence.
FEMA's executive director, Michael Brown, is a lawyer who was fired from the International Arabian Horse Association. He has absolutely zero training or experience in disaster recovery and only has his job because he was a donor to Bush's campaign.
Five days in and the Red Cross is still not on the scene, having been requested/ordered to stay out of the city by Homeland Security for the absolutely infuriating reason that they want to encourage people to evacuate. Are-you-fucking-kidding-me? People have been without food, water, medicine, bathrooms and clothing for nearly a week and the government's policy is to deny America's best organized relief organizations, as well as citizen groups of rescuers, the authorization to provide supplies because it fears it might encourage them to stay in the worst place in America?
The Bush Administration makes a big deal about "sending the wrong message." What kind of message does it send to the world when a week after landfall, Bush's federal government still has no idea what's going on while the situation worsens for the victims? That's not a rhetorical question and the answer is a bad one.
The world watches the United States very closely and our enemies both known and unknown watch even more closely. They can see as plainly as anyone else how utterly retarded our response has been to a catastrophe with several days warning.
My god! September 11 was supposed to be our national security wake-up call. Bush and his buddies have had four-fucking-years, longer than the total of American involvement in World War II, to prepare for this sort of situation. And they've blown it harder than Monica. Now we know what would happen if the United States were attacked again: Dead Americans Everywhere.
Even by conservative thinking, the most basic job of the government is to protect the lives of its citizens and Bush just proved how much of a rat's ass conservatives actually give about the security of the America people.
This disaster is the direct result and culmination of 30 years of conservative anti-government doctrine and 4 years of lazy, destructive administration. They've spent 30 years destroying Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and FDR's New Deal, cutting taxes on the rich in order to make excuses to gut programs that serve Americans. Infrastructure, border security, debt relief, disaster preparation and recovery: these things all worked once, before the Republicans got their hands on them, twisting them to their own callous purposes.
Lake New Orleans is the end product of the every-man-for-himself selfishness of the American conservative movement which has not solved any of our nations problems. So I have these words for all you Anti-American, Anti-Government, Conservative Assholes:
You want to cut my taxes? Fuck you. My taxes protect American lives.
You want to downsize the government? Fuck you. My government defends the American people.
You want the government off your back? Fuck you. My government watches my back.
Conservatism is dead, washed away by the waters of Hurricane Katrina. And when anyone tries to spread its un-human contemptuous philosophy, or support its vile proponents, I will remember New Orleans and they will be struck down by my righteous retribution.
I Will Remember New Orleans.