Being up at 4:30 a.m. is no picnic. There's no one even to blog with at this hour. Such was my desperation that I actually went to Free Republic.
And found this, crossposted from townhall.com.
Will the gop be Katrina's biggest casualty?
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/marktapscott/mt20050917.shtml
"Yes, President Bush gave a good speech Thursday night but no amount of inspiring rhetoric can obscure the fact that Hurricane Katrina may well have drowned the Republican Party as a credible vehicle of conservative reform."
Huh? I knew they weren't a "credible vehicle of conservative reform", and I bet you did too, but can they really be waking up to it? Nah, it's late, and I'm prolly hallucinati-but wait, there's more! Jump with me.
Iraqi war and Bush apologist extroardinaire Kathleen Parker wrote this:
"Defenders of the Bush administration, some of whom seem pathologically unable to see mistakes no matter what the evidence, have winced at the notion that the federal government should have done more in Katrina's aftermath. (I recognize the irony of these words tumbling from my fingertips, given my support of Bush throughout the Iraq war, so please do not feel compelled to congratulate me on my belated epiphany. The levees of my e-mailbox already have been breached, and I'm sitting on the roof of my building as I type.)"
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/kathleenparker/kp20050917.shtml
Could it really be? Is there an awakening happening out there?
I couldn't believe what I was seeing, so I went to BBC, for a dose of reality. There was my explanation right in front of my eyes.
"Hurricane Katrina is one of those rare interludes which has upset the national equilibrium. While 9/11 made Americans angry, the fate of New Orleans has gone beyond that. In varying degrees the whole population is angry, ashamed, and fearful.
Angry at the incompetence and buck-passing between inept local, state and federal authorities; ashamed at those relentlessly recycled pictures of the abandoned black underclass; and fearful to see that the country is still unprepared to cope with a major terrorist attack.
There will be hell to pay for Katrina.
In my view, it is likely to have as traumatic an impact on American political life as the Great Depression of the 1930s. That catastrophe ushered in two decades of Democratic presidents - but even more, it reversed America's entrenched dedication to laissez faire Social Darwinism, a philosophy embraced by both major parties for 150 years. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4230372.stm
That's it, I see a pig flying past the moon, right this very second.
(apologies for the clumsy diary, my html skills are obviously non-existant.)