How Are You Using Katrina To Push Your Tired Talking Points?

[ichi]

Yes, some people are using Katrina to 'push' their agenda.

It happens all of the time here, and the so-called conservatives are just as guilty as anyone.

ichi

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Well this conservative is gonna go down there and sell bottled water for 5 bucks a bottle. Thats my agenda. Of course Ill have to bring my old M14 with me to stop people from looting me.

[Aenlic]

Is that Santa troll? Nice pic.

My VA disability was deposited today rather than the 3rd as usual (thanks to Monday being a holiday). I just transferred the entire amount to the Red Cross.

[Slyspy]

Well this conservative is gonna go down there and sell bottled water for 5 bucks a bottle. Thats my agenda. Of course Ill have to bring my old M14 with me to stop people from looting me.

LOL for that and the troll pic too!

[Slyspy]

Oh and I believe trolls eat SPAM!

[Roark]

Unprecedented event, PJ?

Didn't the same thing happen in Galveston about 100 years ago?

Seems like history repeating to me...

[Papewaio]

The New Orleans Levies broke in 1927.

So this is not unprecedented by any means.

[Don Corleone]

Yes, some people are using Katrina to 'push' their agenda.

It happens all of the time here, and the so-called conservatives are just as guilty as anyone.

ichi

Here, here. The time to make hay out of a tragedy is after it's dealt with. I've seen lots of people of all ilk jump the gun, sadly, in some ways, myself included.

[Lemur]

Here's a conservative libertarian cop using the tragedy to push his "talking points." Enjoy.

-------------------------

I've considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn't going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn't be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I'm probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.

But after watching what's happening in New Orleans-an American city that I've loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can't ever vote for these people again.

Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.

And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, "Right on," because some of that money's bound to fall on my head.

Well, something else would fall on my head first.

I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that's the job. We have A and B teams and I'm a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I've drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.

Here's what these people would do for me.

They would leave me there to die.

Look at the facts. There's no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it's flammable.

In psychology they have what is called a fight-or-flight response. When faced with danger, do you subdue it or do you flee? Some of it has to do with risk assessment, but in this case, there is no flight. There is nowhere to run. So flight means die. If my choice was to pull a pistol on a truck driver or Nat, Jarren, Jayson, or any of you dies, that's no choice at all.

I'm not talking about the looters grabbing big-screen televisions and basketball hoops. I'm talking about the ones that are chest-deep in water carrying bottled water and diapers. You can't tell me for three days to be patient, the bus is coming, and they're piling up bodies in the street median.

We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.

A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, "All the people who weren't bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things."

There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they've lost everything, have no guidance, and don't want to be shot by a looter.

There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.

In the UNITED STATES.

Some people say that you can't hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, "I want you to make sure this never happens again," it was not meant to be specific to "no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss." It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we'd save the ones we could.

And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we're sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that's all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it's obvious that they can't.

Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?

No. It wouldn't. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I'd be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.

But one thing sure would have been different.

They wouldn't have had a whole week to sort it out and know what's coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, "Hey, what if..."

And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired.

I've had it. I'm done. And if the other bunch of assholes can't figure out that what's important is that babies don't starve to death here (and I'm not talking some metaphorical goo-goo thing with school lunches and welfare, but real, actual starving) and we get people out of harm's way, we'll get rid of them too. And so on.

Because this is about leadership, not about bitching on CNN how no one's in charge, or listening to Peggy Noonan furrow her brow at the Governor's performance, or bragging that we've sent in one National Guardsman for every 200 people, or actually having the audacity to say that "we had no idea the levees would break."

Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.

No more.

[Xiahou]

^ Using Katrina to push talking points. Good example.

[Don Corleone]

Well, I can't say this man's thoughts don't resonate with me Lemurmania.

But let me ask you this... which party is better?

The Democrats who promise the world and deliver nothing?

Or the Republicans who promise nothing and deliver all that they promised?

At least Republicans let the average Joe be. Democrats think success is a symptom of some disease that must be eradicated so that all can be equal. Unless you're an artsy 30 something that attends cocktail parties with them in the Manhatten, DC or Hollywood. Then you're free to do as you please, because you're above the rules. The rest of the country, well, we don't count. We're not smart enough to look after ourselves.

I'm not proud to admit this, but there's one reason I consistently vote Republican. I'd rather eat a raw onion than a turd.

[Xiahou]

Sure, there are some things that could've been done better. But then again, there always are arent there? Sure, things could've gone better in many ways- but I think many people have had unrealistic expectations. The tsunami victims had better response/help? BS. How many thousands of them died for days and weeks after the initial event? I think many Americans have a distorted view of how horrible the aftermath of the tsunami was. There were tens of thousands up to their asses in mud and filth and starving/dehydrating to death for weeks afterwards. Just because we didn't have news correspondents on every corner around the Indian Ocean screaming "Where is the relief?" like we do in the US doesnt mean that everything was rosey.

Moreover, the destruction wrought on New Orleans and the majority of the Gulf coast was on a massive, unprecedented scale. All transportation and utilities are almost totally destroyed. Roads were flooded, airports were destroyed and waterways were clogged with debris. You can't magic supplies and personel into place. Considering the relatively few days that have passed, it's important to keep some perspective and look at what has been accomplished. How many tens of thousands of aid workers and national guard members have been brought into the afflicted areas? How many tons of supplies? How many tens of thousands of victims have been rescued?

Im not trying to be an administration apologist- their response hasn't been perfect and there is much more that our government needs to be doing on all levels. However, people that are using this tragedy as a hammer to bash the war in Iraq and make outlandish claims like Bush should be imprisoned or that we're letting people die because of racism is just asinine and BS.

Let's keep some perspective, help how we can and avoid political point scoring.

[Aurelian]

This isn't about talking points. I've been hearing Republican senators, representatives, and newspaper men as mad about the administration's response to this disaster as I've been. They're obviously not spouting political talking points, they're responding to objective reality.

[PanzerJaeger]

I was refering to the people on this board.

It does seem though that a lot of people are trying to pass the buck to the executive on this one - people who themselves were less than prepared for the situation.

If you look at the way hurricane responses are set up, the state governments are in charge and the federal level aids them. I believe even FEMA and other direct action groups are usually coordinated by the state governments as they have a better grasp of the situation.

This time the state and local governments collapsed and the federal level had to take over. Naturally that takes some time. Of course we all dont like to babies without food on the street but we need to have a little perspective.

Again, people seem to be pushing the standard "its all Bush's fault" talking points whenever anything bad happens in the world. It looks like to me the administration figured out relatively quickly all control on a local level was lost and took action. A couple of days really isnt that long to completely overhaul the command system and assume responsibilites that you didnt intend to.

[AntiochusIII]

Ah yes. It's the evil leftists again, laughing at the death of thousands while they're pushing their political agenda on to those bodies of dead innocents, eh? How pathetic.

That this very thread is started suggests otherwise.

[Aenlic]

And I'll stop slamming Bush when he's standing in the rubble of a poor black family's house in Louisiana saying it'll be rebuilt and be more beautiful than before and he'll one day be on its porch sipping tea, just like when he was at the remains of one of Trent Lott's homes in Mississippi. But we all know that isn't going to happen, don't we?

There's plenty of blame to go around. And the buck stops where it is supposed to stop, in spite of efforts to make it go away and stop bothering people.