Department of Things I Can't Write About Without Resorting to Profanity

Fuck you, Karl Rove:

 “The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst. “I know this is being thought a lot about in Washington and at the White House and discussed and I suspect they will monitor it carefully and figure out what to do.”

Yeah, Karl, Hurricane Katrina was so fucking bad for you and the idiot king. Boo fucking hoo. If you would have done something for the people of New Orleans, rather than dither and share cakes with John McCain, that might not have been bad. But that would have required a competent, caring, capable president, which we don’t have, thanks to you.

Not to mention, of course, that global warming is playing its role in this, something you’ve been foursquare against working to solve.

If August weather is bad for the GOP, it’s on your own head. If you don’t feel good about the memories of Katrina — you shouldn’t, you fucking asshole. You failed your fellow Americans. If you didn’t want to feel bad about it, maybe you should have cared for the poor, black people drowning in New Orleans. But you didn’t care then, and you don’t care now — because no matter how bad August weather is for you, Karl, it’s far, far worse for the people of the Gulf Coast, who’ve lost their homes, family members, even their lives. Those people, I feel bad for. You can go to hell.

This entry posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Katrina. Bookmark the permalink. 

12 Responses to Department of Things I Can't Write About Without Resorting to Profanity

  1. 1
    Auguste says:

    Among many other things, I wonder if Karl Rove is aware that the Republican National Convention is in September?

  2. 2
    RonF says:

    The day that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, President Bush had done everything he could. The requisite Federal agencies had reviewed the State and local emergency plans with the local authorities. He had declared a Federal state of emergency 3 days before, authorizing the use of Federal resources by State and local authorities.

    Who utterly failed to do so. An evacuation plan doesn’t do you much good when you don’t actually call for people to evacuate and put it into action. When hundreds of school buses are sitting in a parking lot unused, and when someone who actually has the gumption to load up a bunch of people in them and do the job that the State didn’t do gets arrested by the local authorities for stealing a bus, it’s not the Federal government’s fault.

    I don’t intend to absolve President Bush on this entire situation. The Bush administration has done an lousy job post-Katrina. But we have a federal system of government, not a socialist one. For very good reasons that haven’t changed it is up to the local authorities to prepare for a situation like this, make a decision as to when to act and then to execute plans. Mayor Nagin and then-Governor Bianco had all the access to Federal resources they needed, not to mention State resources such as the State Police and the National Guard. They had the responsibility and the authority to evacuate New Orleans and otherwise prepare for Katrina’s landfall, and they completely failed. The blood of the people who died then is on their hands, not President Bush’s.

  3. 3
    Daran says:

    The day that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, President Bush had done everything he could. The requisite Federal agencies had reviewed the State and local emergency plans with the local authorities. He had declared a Federal state of emergency 3 days before, authorizing the use of Federal resources by State and local authorities.

    Who utterly failed to do so. An evacuation plan doesn’t do you much good when you don’t actually call for people to evacuate and put it into action. When hundreds of school buses are sitting in a parking lot unused, and when someone who actually has the gumption to load up a bunch of people in them and do the job that the State didn’t do gets arrested by the local authorities for stealing a bus, it’s not the Federal government’s fault.

    Here’s how Snopes made the point:

    Whether this photograph truly represents a lost opportunity to have evacuated a substantial number of New Orleans residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina is difficult to assess. Such a claim presumes an availability of resources (e.g., experienced drivers, fuel) and workable logistics (e.g., sufficient means of notifying and getting residents to departure points, sufficiently clear roads for multiple trips out of town and back, adequate facilities within a reasonable driving distance capable of providing shelter, food, and water to a large number of people for an indeterminate period of time on short notice) that may or may not have been present. (There’s no guarantee that all the buses shown in this picture were even in working condition.) And, given the particular geography of New Orleans any such evacuation would have had to have begun well in advance of Hurricane Katrina to avoid exposing residents to the potential danger of being stuck in buses on traffic-clogged roads in the path of an approaching hurricane. Moreover, any type of evacuation effort would have incurred a substantial outlay of funds from local and/or state governments; while everyone agrees with the advantage of hindsight that would have been money well spent, many taxpayers might not have been left feeling so enthusiastic about footing the bill for an unnecessary evacuation had Hurricane Katrina not proved so damaging.

    Opportunities like the one posited here may or may not have been missed in New Orleans, but coping with the uncertainty and confusion of natural disasters as they unfold is rarely as simple as it might seem in retrospect.

  4. 4
    RonF says:

    If it turns out that had been a bus graveyard instead of functioning buses I imagine that point would have been made by now. As far as all the logistical issues named go – in that specific case, maybe true. Maybe a parking lot full of buses in some other location would have been the better one to use. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that there were a bunch of people in New Orleans that didn’t own cars and needed to be gotten out of town. As literal truth that picture may or may not have been accurate. As a metaphor for resources that were available but unused because of Mayoral and Gubernatorial dithering and lack of courage it hit the nail on the head.

    Such a claim presumes an availability of resources

    any such evacuation would have had to have begun well in advance of Hurricane Katrina to avoid exposing residents to the potential danger of being stuck in buses on traffic-clogged roads in the path of an approaching hurricane.

    All of which are reasons for why we have numerous people in local and State government whose job it is to create and test disaster plans and why we have Mayors and Governors whose job it is to make sure those people are doing their jobs.

    Moreover, any type of evacuation effort would have incurred a substantial outlay of funds from local and/or state governments; while everyone agrees with the advantage of hindsight that would have been money well spent, many taxpayers might not have been left feeling so enthusiastic about footing the bill for an unnecessary evacuation had Hurricane Katrina not proved so damaging.

    Tough shit. Part of the job description for holding local and State office is having to make that call. The kind of person that isn’t willing to risk their job over that kind of decision is not the kind of person you should be electing to office. This is why evaluation of a candidate’s character is so important.

    And making such decisions and executing them at the State and local level is NOT part of the President’s job description. That’s why you HAVE Mayors and Governors.

  5. 5
    Radfem says:

    I loved whoever it was who appointed the president of the International Arabian Association (and he was forced to resign from that job) to head EP&R of FEMA. A brilliant move and it wasn’t bad that it was discovered after the fact that he’d falsified his resume.

  6. 6
    Jeff Fecke says:

    And sadly, Radfem, I think Brownie’s only real sin was that he was completely unqualified for the job — he seemed to want to do the right thing, but not know how — which is why Mike “Skeletor” Chertoff should have been defenestrated as well.

  7. 7
    Radfem says:

    Well, experience does count especially in times of crisis where there’s poor planning and implementation across the board.

    Not that even on a great day FEMA’s easy to deal with. Since most people don’t have earthquake insurance in California and most that do don’t have masonry chimney coverage, many people use FEMA to rebuild their chimneys and after about three years, there will be a chimney for every house on the block. But the process isn’t very user friendly as my parents and others found. And that’s a relatively minor thing, not quite the scope of a Katrina disaster.

  8. 8
    Radfem says:

    By the way, I’m not trying to be snarky with the Brown comment but I remember thinking when he bumbled and then his lack of experience coming out on top of all the other mess, omigod!

    The whole thing was such a nightmare.

    And I relate to the not swearing or trying not to when you’re blogging on a subject. I was trying to write on the acquittal of one of my city’s former police officers in connection to alleged war crimes. The acquittal was not surprising given the dearth of evidence including no identies of those killed. They shouldn’t have moved forward if they didn’t have strong evidence b/c they get only one chance. And from what the testimony read, it was pretty horrific what did happen and a taped phone call was played where the defendant admitted to the sergeant he had ordered the killings and done them.

    And in the typical small world situation, I know the jury forewoman, not well but I’m not surprised with her decision. I think she made her mind up on day one. But he’s going to apply to get his job back and this is after, one of the nation’s top newspapers in circulation wrote about comments he made on a phone call taped by the navy of how he abused people on a regular basis and then figured out a reason to bust them. His excuse was that he was drinking when me told the “untrue stories”. So it remains to be seen whether he’ll be back on the force. It could go either way actually.

    Incidently, the only other case involving the military that’s similar to this one is one of the men charged with raping a 15 year old girl and killing her and her entire family. The lawyer defending the man in that case attended the trial in my city. So I wonder how that trial will play out in civilian court.

    But thinking about him coming back on the force if that’s the case (and the agency wouldn’t have to say what it was doing) is very sad.

  9. 9
    RonF says:

    Radfem, you would think that with all that crap going on the FBI would be sniffing around. Are they?

  10. 10
    Radfem says:

    Good question! If they are, no one knows about it. But then again, when they were investigating a fatal shooting of a mentally ill man by an officer, it took some information that turned out to be false to get them to go away.

    Getting them to initiate a civil rights investigation for example is not that difficult to do and the FBI has the option of course of doing its own initiating in particular circumstances. Getting them to stick with it over the long haul that it often takes to reach the end of a comprehensive, unbiased investigation let alone any further action if violations of federal law are found is much harder.

    It gets interesting sometimes. I spoke out at a meeting about a conversation that I had with an elected official which he made inappropriate and definitely unethical comments (as he tried to persuade me to think his way after reading my site) and the next thing I knew, I received a phone call of someone giving me contact information for an FBI agent who wanted to talk to me about that meeting b/c of complaints that the official had threatened a police commissioner into resigning his position. I didn’t see how what he said to me was illegal in terms of my conversation though it was definitely slimy and in the political climate, it’s not the best place to be discovered to be talking to federal officials especially since there would be no outcome besides that nothing would happen whether because under the law, it shouldn’t or it wouldn’t for other reasons. The FBI never pushed the issue.

    The ex-officer was acquitted at trial and it’s true that factual evidence was in short supply due in large part to witnesses who saw the execution style shootings taking the fifth (for themselves, as earlier in the investigation they had cooperated with the investigators) to avoid incriminating themselves or having testimony that could be used to impeach them at the court martial proceedings. Something really bad happened, that is clear and the dehumanizing of the men killed was definitely there based on the testimony. I think the killing of one of the squad members earlier that day and the need of the squad members to feel invulnerable in a war zone was part of it, but not all of it.

    But this is about what he said about working in the police department. Then he said what he got caught saying were lies. So then you have what he said he did (which is illegal, being that excessive force and lying on police reports, warrants or testimony in court are also criminal offenses in my state) and then him saying that he lied about that. If they take him back (which admittingly isn’t a foregone conclusion at all), it’s as much a commentary on what they’re really about at least much more than anything they’ve said.

    But I feel so badly for any of the surviving family members of that young woman who was raped and killed in Iraq in front of her family before they were killed and set on fire. There has to be a trial proceeding against the main instigator (who is now a civilian) with evidence to put on by the prosecution but there has to be humanization of the victims, to be real to the jury. They have to have names and faces. Hopefully, the attorneys will learn from this case.

    But I can understand what Jeff said about it being difficult to write without profanity yet at the same time, the only thing that you feel like you can do in some situations is to write.

  11. 11
    Daran says:

    Such a claim presumes an availability of resources

    You said yourself, the federal emergency had been declared just three days before the storm hit.

  12. 12
    RonF says:

    Thanks for the info, Radfem. Sounds tough. Here in Chicago we see our share of this kind of thing as well. All I can say is that at some point the good guys do win and changes are made. That doesn’t always bring justice to the victims, but it cuts down on the number of new victims.

    Daran, the delay in calling a Federal emergency on the matter was due to inaction and lack of cooperation on the part of the State and local authorities, not the Federal ones. The Feds were in contact with Bianco and Nagin well before that time and couldn’t get them to pull the trigger. IMO that’s likely due to “OMG, if we evacuate everyone and Katrina misses we might not get re-elected.”

    In addition, note that the State/local authorities failed to take other actions they could that they had complete control over, such as calling out the Louisiana National Guard and implementing their emergency plans.