The Enemy.I would like to say to Cindy Sheehan and her supporters: Don't be a group of unthinking lemmings, said Mitzy Kenny of Ridgeley, W.Va., whose husband died in Iraq last year. She said the anti-war demonstrations ‘can affect the war in a really negative way. It gives the enemy hope.’
Think of the germs alone.Today, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Louisiana and toured a medical facility at the New Orleans international airport. He spoke to and shook hands with military and rescue officials, but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped, Reuters reported.
You jerk! You little towel-snapping jerk! This is where it's happenin', blog-central, nut to nut, ball to ball! I hate snappy journalism! I loathe and despise the part of the male brain that is stuck in the moist fumbling heat of locker room! For life!“Krugman's argument appears to be that they shouldn't negotiate because Bush's starting position is unacceptable. It usually is in negotiations!”
Former Sen. and Attorney General John Ashcroft, providing commentary for CNN, said at one point Monday afternoon that there were just two things that Roberts shouldn't have to address: the future or the past.
Yes.cassiopaea asks:
Is the difference one that exists between people who are willing to face the ‘terror of the situation’ and those who simply cannot live in the state of tension produced by having to make moral decisions?
Oh dear. Someone thinks we care what Midge Decter felt? Ever?“Rats on the West Side, bedbugs uptown / What a mess! This town's in tatters / I've been shattered,” Mick Jagger sang in 1978.
Midge Decter woke up the morning after the night of looting during the New York blackout of 1977 feeling as if she had “been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one's house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.”
Neatly said. Those Brits don't mince words. Nice to know that elsewhere on the globe, meaning remains intact.If ever there was a moment for America to show itself the 'humble nation' that President Bush so mendaciously promised in 2000, this is it. But humility is not in this administration's gene pool. Its nature is to lecture and lord it over others.
Even Katrina, which turned a major American city into Mogadishu and laid bare the shameful divisions of wealth, class and colour in the US for all the world to see, is unlikely to dent its sense of righteousness in its foreign policy.
But reality cannot forever be denied, even by this White House which for so long has lived in a universe in which everything is going swimmingly in Iraq, where tax cuts answer all problems, and where global warming does not exist.
Katrina, and the initial shambolic response of the government to the calamity, have changed everything.
For the world, US preaching, US leadership, even US power ring hollow. Back home, a quarter-century era of anti-government is surely coming to an end. President Bush could rise to the occasion by recognising this.
More probably he will not. So then he will spend out his time in office as the lamest of lame ducks, disavowed even by those in his party who realise that his way of doing things does not work.
The Blogosphere Left doesn't care about the levees, or emergency response plans, or the logistical challenge of completely evacuating a city of 500,000, or the ugly repercussions when this is not done.
Bush hatred among the pathological Left just is. It doesn't have a cause.
Well tough darties, sweetie. “Conservative” translates to a lowering and lessening of everything decent people hold dear—and you lot haven't the brains to pull it off.As William Kristol writes in the Weekly Standard, nominating the ‘mediocre’ Gonzales would be a way for Bush to lose conservatives who are already going soft on the president anyway. Kristol says a Gonzales nomination ‘would utterly demoralize’ many of Bush's supporters, ‘who are sticking with him and his party, through troubles in Iraq and screw-ups with Katrina, precisely because they want a few important things out of a Bush presidency—and one of these is a more conservative court.’
. . . I'd be hiding my sorry Republican ass, were I you. Sigh. Where are Huey and Bobby, those gutsy, scary kids . . .Then she added: “What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”
Yes, yes ... that's it! I take no credit for the idea; it belongs to Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, but this magnificent title needs no dribbling on afterward; (sorry, Mitchell, but I'm afraid you're of the Eyes Glaze Over school of writing. If it's any consolation, it is a really big school.)
What's more, however unreadable ... politically, offensiveness-wise? Head and shoulders above the buzz-machine towel-snappers, trust me.
Of course that's not writing, either.
But whoa, thank you, again. Perfect explanation. As would be Stunned With A Cattle Prod ... but we know the truth, don't we: No Battery Pack, No Speak.
I was going to harp on this Broken thing, but Maureen Dowd came pretty damn close to nailing it, today. The whole clueless bunch. It isn't stupidity, it isn't callousness, (well, it is callousness) it isn't anything you think.
God, I love it. The only Right Thing in the whole catastrophe: this is The Sequel.
An indifference just a little bit shredded, today.“Today, as the President comes to Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi for his ceremonial trip to look at the victims of the devastation, he would do well to have a plan more significant than a ceremonial tour.”
”His whole response is unacceptable.”
“How can blacks be locked out of the leadership, and trapped in the suffering?”
“It is that lack of sensitivity and compassion that represents a kind of incompetence.”
“There's a historical indifference to the pain of poor people and black people in this country.”
—Rev. Jesse Jackson
