DKossians
My very large family and I just got this chain email from my uncle, obviously written by a troll, which I thought I'd post here, along with my response, which follows it.
The former will likely be floating around the internet for a while and people should beware of passing it along. It certainly indicates how the Kool-Aid drinkers who support Bush are viewing the Katrina disaster.
The latter, my response, will probably get me disinvited from the family Xmas party by a near unanimous vote. Of course, you're more than welcome to pass it along if you'd like, adding to it, refining it, putting in chronological order, whatever.
AYM
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THE ORIGINAL EMAIL FROM MY UNCLE
Subject: McComb aftermath of Katrina
To my friends and family:
What I have seen since Katrina:
The poor and the wealthy hurt by the storm.
Black, white, Hispanic, Oriental and Indian all hurt by the storm.
Christian people giving, giving, giving.
Churches going all out to minister in Jesus' name.
Neighbors going door to door helping one another.
Thugs and hoodlums going door to door looking for someone vunerable.
Ice and water being fought over as police tried to keep the peace.
People coming up from New Orleans taking over empty houses because shelters are full.
Out of town volunteers coming with food and staying for now a week still serving it.
The Churches all over this part of the country doing what Christians do in a crisis.
Fema doing a wonderful job in getting help to us.
The Red Cross doing a great job in the shelters.
The Salvation Army doing a great job in the community.
Four Hundred crewman from everywhere bring back the power to our homes, churches and businesses.
Lines at service stations a block to a mile long.
National Guardsman patroling the streets of Mccomb along with Kentucky policemen protecting us from the hoodlums and thugs of McComb, Pike County
and New Orleans (the most dangerous city in the world before Katrina.)
Drug dealers working outside shelters.
Doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel working tirelessly, even sleeping in the hospital to do the job God called them to do.
WHAT I HAVE NOT SEEN;
The ACLU setting up a feeding line.
People for the American Way helping in the shelters.
The NAACP doing any work whatsover.
The American Atheist organization serving meals in the shelters.
Jesse Jackson directing traffic at the gas stations.
I could go on but you get my message. Its the Christian people with love and compassion who do the work.
The gripers in Congress should come on down and get in line to pass the water and the ice. Are you listening Hillary, Chuck, Teddy and all the
sorry loafers we call senators and congressmen. They don't have a clue as to what this life is all about here on the Gulf Coast.
Boy I feel better now.
David A. Millican
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MY RESPONSE
Family, friends, et al.
This moron Millican should open his eyes a little wider.
What I've seen, in no particular order, is his supposedly Born Again president:
--play guitar at a fund raiser while an American city died
--call former RNC head, now Dixie governor Haley Barbour four times a day while the LA governor had to leave frantic messages for Andy Card
--pine for his days of boozing it up in the Big Easy and get excited about rebuilding not NOLA but Trent Lott's porch
--continue his vacation because only thousands of poor black Democrats were dying, not some white woman in a decade-long vegetative state
--supposedly view the destruction from thousands of feet above (of course, who knows where that picture was actually taken or even if the
plane was in the air), then go and meet only people who were carefully vetted beforehand, that
is, when he bothered to get out of his truck
--spout legalese about who should have been in charge when he himself was, by disaster area statutes, in charge before Katrina hit, supported by all those commentators who took Clinton to task for parsing the definition of "is"
--deny on national TV that anyone could have foreseen the levees being breeched after he spent years cutting the funding to secure the
levees, ignoring the desperate pleas of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and despite a briefing the weekend before the storm hit from the head of the national hurricane center who requested the meeting because he was so terrified of what
would happen to NOLA.
--make his little Ground Zero speech under lighting worthy of Albert Speer and powered by electricity that was cut from the district an
hour after he left, plunging the area back into darkness
--throw hundreds of billions of dollars at his cronies in Halliburton et al. to supposedly rebuild the city when in fact he just cares
about his political career, just as he upped his $15M in relief for the Asian tsunami last year to
$300M after he was vilified as cheapskate (btw, less than $140M has actually been paid out)
--take grudging responsibility for the debacle of an aftermath just hours after an investigation showed that the LA governor did everything
she was supposed to do when she was supposed to do it, putting the ball in his court
--take none of the accountability that comes with responsibility
--set up a Congressional investigation dominated by Republicans and without supoena power in order to facilitate the whitewash and cover up his total accountability
--be discovered to have filled the most critical emergency services roles in the government with cronies and the college roommates of cronies, whom he subsequently praised for having done "a heck of a job"
--put his political fixer Rove in charge of rebuilding NOLA, despite his having no experience in doing anything of the kind (of course that's par for the course for all his appointments).
--have the Justice Dept look into whether any environmental groups had sued over the levees so he could blame them
--say he won't play the "blame game" (as if any of this is a game) while he and his dirtbag ilk blame local Democrats; the infirm, aged and car-less for not leaving; gays and abortion doctors for attracting the hurricane in the first place; something new every day.
--stand by as FEMA would not let local officials use their schoolbuses toevacuate people because they lacked air conditioning, promised NOLA 500 buses which never arrived, and then would not let the Red Cross into NOLA for days and days
--let the National Guard turn back refugees from escaping NOLA, and kept the US Navy standing uselessly off shore for days
--give Pat Robertson's charity, Operation Blessing, second billing to the Red Cross on the FEMA site, even though it's as corrupt an operation as they come
--and have a piece of crap mother like Barbara Bush who said, with a chuckle, that the refugees, being poor in the first place, were probably better off in the Astrodome.
Some Christian. Come compassion.
What I don't see, though, is the country buying Bush's line of bullshit and his party's desperate, flat out lies this time around. His approval rating is in the high 30s and plummeting every day. Fiscal conservatives are realizing he's spending money like a drunken sailor in Singapore, and borrowing money from the Chinese to do it. Corporate conservatives are realizing that the CEO president is running yet another company into the ground and making no changes to stop the destruction. Those who voted for him for security reasons are realizing that he again failed to save another an American city from a terrible,
foreseeable and preventable disaster--and that he has crippled our capacity to respond to any disaster, terrorist or not. Those who voted for him because he's the type of guy they would like to have a beer with are wondering whether he's fallen off the wagon.
There will always be people like this Millican, if such a person even exists, who will try to sway gullible Americans with their half-assed arguments, racist generalities and outright lies. Then again, if there weren't people like them,
Bush wouldn't have any base at all.
Unlike Millican, I don't feel better at all.