Open Up One Sleeping Eye

Even the right wing apoligetocracy is waking up. Geraldo, Paula Zahn, David Brooks, Anderson Cooper, the usual "balanced" Ted Koppel have all taken big swings at Bush, at FEMA, at Cheroff, at Imelda Condaleeza, and on. Steve Gilliard welcomes them to consciousness at The News Blog:

Well, motherfuckers, and that means you, fat ass Goldberg and your master, Rich Lowry, PNAC Bitch Beinart, the racist wannabe white Malkin and the little fucktards at LGF, Bareback Andy and "Diversity" Instacracker, all you backstabbing, fag hating uncle tom ministers, you can see Dear Leader in action. America's largest port is gone, maybe forever, gas is $5+ a gallon and FEMA is coming. Whores come faster with old men than FEMA is getting to NOLA.

How did your wartime President react? Like Chiang Kai-Shek when the Yellow River flooded in 1944, with corrupt indifference.

Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question. Rick Perry is trying to save his ass, but it ain't working. NOLA looks like ANGOLA and that ain't flying.

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.

And more. As William Gibson famously said of watching Blade Runner, it's like someone drilled into my brain and put it on the screen. Read it all; this is what my American experience has been since November 2000.

Wild Bill, Dead At Last

There were worse people than William Rehnquist. Few of them have had such a long run of substantial power over the course of the United States, starting with his work as a poll watcher in Arizona, disenfranchising blacks by administering literacy tests; through his perjury during his Supreme Court nomination hearings, slandering the name of Justice Robert Jackson with lies of race hatred; through his signed concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, in which he made it clear that his love for democracy began and ended with allowing the vote among people who agreed with him.

I'm sure he loved his wife and children, but that's more in the category of "minimal qualification for humanity" than anything actually admirable. He liked Gilbert and Sullivan and had a small flare for the silly.

He should be ground into dust and scattered in the cold North Sea. It's better than he deserves, because we deserved better than him.

What the Fed can't honestly say

This bit of felicitous phrasing comes from Andrew Plotkin on rasff:

One can easily imagine a federal administration which said "NOLA flooded, because there's nothing mortals can do to prevent flooding with that kind of storm. But we did everything mortals *could* do to prevent it, and supported state/local operations to protect the city. We upheld the budget allocations to do the work; the work just wasn't specced for this kind of problem."

We know that there were preparations unmade, steps untaken, procedures unfollowed. No one can honestly look at the last week and say, "Everything that could be done was done." It is possible that no amount of preparation would have made things substantially better. But the attempt should have been made, and of course wasn't.