Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Compassionate Conservatives

“It seems to me that the poor should have had the EASIEST time leaving. They don’t need to pay for an extended leave from their home, they could have just packed a few belongings and walked away to start over somewhere else. What did they have to lose?

When the wealthy evacuate, they leave behind nice houses, expensive cars, possibly pets that they treat as members of the family, valuable jewelry, family heirlooms, etc. This makes it emotionally difficult for wealthy people to leave. But by definition, the poor do not have this burden: they either rent their homes, or they are in public housing; their cars are practically junk anyway; and they don’t have any valuable possessions. This is what it means to be poor. These people could just pick up their few belongings, buy a one-way bus ticket to any city and be poor there. Supposing they even had jobs in NO, it’s not like minimum wage jobs are hard to come by.”

More at the link if you can stand it.

I’m going to have one stiff drink. And then another. I don’t recognize that as a fellow human much less a fellow American.

Not A National Disaster

Bill O’Reilly is trying with all his might to make this story about “thugs” and bad Democrats but both Fox news reporters on the ground are having none of it. Shepard Smith and Steve Harrigan are both insisting that the story is about people dying and starving on the streets of New Orleans. Smith is particularly upset that the mayor sent buses to the Hyatt today and took tourists over to the Superdome and let them off at the front of the line.

O’Reilly says “you sound so bitter” and said they need a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani. Smith replies that what they needed “on the first day was food and water and what they needed on the second day was food and water and what they needed on the third day was food and water.”

O’Reilly is practically rolling his eyes with impatience at Smith’s outrage about the plight of a bunch of losers who were asking for it. He really, really wants to talk about scary black boogeymen and steppin-fetchit politicans. It doesn’t work out. He looks relieved to move over to the Natalee Holloway story.

Luckily, they’ve got it straight over on The Corner:

NOT A NATIONAL DISGRACE [Rich Lowry]
A dissent from this column I wrote yesterday:

It is not. It is – or ought to be – a disgrace and an embarrassment to Louisiana and New Orleans. I see the way Florida prepares for and responds to hurricanes; I see the way Mississippi and Alabama are dealing with this one; I’ve seen the Carolinas and Virginia deal with hurricanes, too. I’ve been in Miami and Norfolk when hurricanes hit, though not as severe as this one, and seen folks come together to support each other in the crisis. I see the outpouring of support from surrounding states and from the federal government heading to Louisiana as fast as it can.

And then I see citizens of New Orleans shooting, raping, burning, and plundering while their government officials stand by helplessly…

Fox News reporters have played this story pretty straight (for them) and it’s making the stars extremely uncomfortable. Somebody’s going to have to have a talk with the supporting cast. They are going off script.

Update: Sean’s up now and he’s equally uncomfortable with Shep’s story about the thousands still stuck on freeways and bridges with no food and water — who have been ignored for days now. He’s been covering one single bridge for days and nobody knows why they haven’t been helped yet. He’s almost shrill.

Now Geraldo comes on and he freaks out, begging the authorities to let people still stuck at the convention center walk out of town. Shep comes back and he says they have checkpoints set up turning people back to the city if they try. (wtf?) They are both on the verge of tears.

Sean says they need to get some perspective and Shep screams at him “this is the perspective!”

This was some amazing TV. Kudos to Shep Smith and Geraldo for not letting O’Reilly and Hannity spin their GOP “resolve” apologia bullshit. I’m fairly shocked.

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Blitzkrieg

by tristero

Now we know the rightwing’s fall strategy. If Obama so much as breathes, Republicans plan on screaming bloody murder. Think I’m kidding?

Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer today released the following statement condemning President Obama’s use of taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

Ever since 9/11, I have been saying that if Gore had been president and the US was attacked like that, Republicans would be demanding his immediate resignation for failing to protect the country. “Ridiculous!” my friends exclaimed. “In a moment of crisis like 9/11, Republicans would certainly have supported anyone who was president.”

I thought my friends were hopelessly naive (the few times I’ve mentioned my theory in blogposts, I’ve received similar reactions). But not even I ever imagined that a major political party would object to an address to schoolchildren from the president of the United States.

These people are seriously crazy. And seriously dangerous.

A Little Slice Of Turkey

by dday

I don’t want war! All I want is peace…peace…peace…!
A little piece of Poland,
A little piece of France,
A little piece of Austria
And Hungary, perchance!
A little slice of Turkey
And all that that entails,
And then a bit of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales!”

-Mel Brooks, To Be Or Not To Be

I guess the news peg for this is the anniversary of the start of WWII in September 1939, but Pat Buchanan has gone ahead and apologized for Hitler, claiming he sought no empire or wider war with Europe, and had merely benign interests of German unification at heart:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Matt Yglesias does quick work of the historical inaccuracies – Hitler invaded Russia as soon as he achieved a border with them by conquering Poland. And this is a decent riposte as well – Buchanan seems to expect a crazy person to also be a rational military strategist, and when he’s not, searches for alternative explanation (“Hitler couldn’t have wanted war because he didn’t have enough planes! So it’s Britain’s fault!”).

But I’ll take the less dainty approach. In 1939, in a small town named Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan’s revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum – why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don’t you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn’t live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

But the bigger point here to be made is that Pat Buchanan is paid by the allegedly liberal cable news network MSNBC, he has been on it for years, if you add up all his appearances throughout the day he probably spends as much time on the air as anyone outside of the Morning Joe crowd, and that’s… OK. Calling Hitler misunderstood is not a firing offense at the liberal cable news network MSNBC.

Good to know.

My favorite comment in the Buchanan thread, by the way:

summarex
Great Article Pat.
But what’s your beef with general Pinochet?

Must be a follower of Milton Friedman.

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Government Stinks vs. “I Agree Government Stinks But We Can Do Better”

by dday

Conservatives very smartly conflated the bailout and the stimulus in people’s minds, and traded off public anger with one to demonize the other. They’re still doing it, too, with Eric Cantor today suggesting to cancel the rest of the stimulus and “pay off the debt.” Most of the continuing debt comes from Bush-era policies, so this is nonsense. It’s also wrong to state that the stimulus should be cancelled because it’s not working. In fact, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal tells us the opposite today:

The U.S. economy is beginning to show signs of improvement, with many economists asserting the worst is past and data pointing to stronger-than-expected growth. On Tuesday, data showed manufacturing grew in August for the first time in more than a year. “There’s a method to the madness. We’re getting out of this,” said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight.

Much of the stimulus spending is just beginning to trickle through the economy, with spending expected to peak sometime later this year or in early 2010. The government has funneled about $60 billion of the $288 billion in promised tax cuts to U.S. households, while about $84 billion of the $499 billion in spending has been paid. About $200 billion has been promised to certain projects, such as infrastructure and energy projects.

Economists say the money out the door — combined with the expectation of additional funds flowing soon — is fueling growth above where it would have been without any government action.

Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter — something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

The recovery is still jobless thus far, which means it’s not a real recovery yet. And the White House made two mistakes – one, they soft-pedaled the recession, claiming that unemployment would not go above 9% or so, leaving them susceptible to the charge that the stimulus isn’t working; and two, they put far too much of the stimulus into tax cuts instead of the public investment that would have made it even more successful, particularly on the jobs front.

But without the public investment the stimulus has thus far provided and will continue to provide, we’d be mired in more negative growth and a near-depression.

The President has actually tried to talk up the benefits of the stimulus, but not in a forceful way. As a result, the conservative conflation has led to a souring on government, directly attributable to a lack of leadership and messaging.

Paul Krugman argued recently that Obama hadn’t effectively used the bully pulpit to slay “government-is-bad fundamentalism.” This is only one poll, but it’s fair to ask whether these numbers bear that out.

Obama’s poll slide has prompted some to ask whether his presidency might fall short of the transformative moment many expected. I think it’s too early to reach a conclusion on this. If Obama pulls out a health care victory, everything will shift again.

But for a time it seemed like shattering the government-is-bad paradigm was distinctly within Obama’s reach. General confidence in the government’s ability to secure the public’s well being seems like pretty good number to keep an eye on when gaming out the potential for transformation of this moment, and of this presidency.

This has mostly resonated in the health care debate, with insurance companies inexplicably getting somewhat higher marks now than government as a health care provider, despite the fact that the groups with the highest satisfaction with their health care are seniors (government-provided single-payer system), and veterans (government-run NHS-style system).

Politics is about storytelling. Obama during his campaign actually started to tell a pretty decent story about government as a guarantor of basic rights, which can equalize opportunity and give everyone a shot. He told a story of community, where we take care of each other and use government as a means to do so. Then he stopped. He thought it was much better to tell everyone that “95% of you will see a tax cut”.

And as a result, the public investment program that averted a depression is considered a failure.

Very dangerous.

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In Your Name

by digby

I knew several decades ago that it was going to be hard for me deal with the fact that the US had reverted to being a barbaric death penalty nation. Not that there is any dearth of very bad people who deserve to die here, but the idea that our clunky justice system was capable of sorting out such things in anything resembling a just manner seemed impossible to me. The moral implications of the state taking lives of people who are securely locked up as a matter of self-defense is completely illogical, although I guess most people believe there is some value in demonstrating the “eye for and eye” concept as a deterrent. I haven’t seen any evidence that this works, but it’s an intuitive thing that most people seem to feel is important.

Still, reagrdless of where you stand on the morality of executing guilty people, justice is a joke when the state arbitrarily takes the lives of some guilty people and not others and subjects citizens to the capriciousness of a patchwork of laws that vary from one state to the next. It only gets worse when one considers the inevitability of human error, capriciousness and plain old malevolence of those in authority. But nothing in all that compares to the absolute certainty that the state executes innocent people, which is a moral nightmare of such epic proportions that it still stuns me to think that any civilized country would do such a thing. (Well, maybe not so much anymore — after all, we are back to torture now, too.)

Many death penalty proponents have always argued that it hasn’t happened, that among the thousands of people the United States has executed, none were innocent. It’s always been a fatuous claim, considering how many prisoners have been released from death row due to factual innocence, although the pro death people have always said that “proves” that the system works.

Well, we now have proof that it did happen. And it’s the most horrifying story you can imagine, of a man who was convicted and executed for killing his own children in a fire by incompetent police work, witnesses who changed their version of events once the police focused on the suspect, and a jailhouse snitch. He didn’t do it.

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”

It’s not like the authorities didn’t have notice of this before he was executed. They did. They just didn’t pay attention. And even if they hadn’t known about it, it wouldn’t take away the horrifying guilt of the state of Texas executing an innocent person in cold ritualistic fashion, after a long, drawn out period of mental and physical torture in prison. It’s not like they didn’t have an alternative.

There are some thing which the law is simply inadequate to do. Determining to an absolute certainty that someone is guilty is certainly possible. But it’s also possible for that same system to make the same determination that that someone is guilty who isn’t. You can’t allow people’s lives to be taken under a system like that and call it justice.

Read the whole article. It’s important.

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How To Lose The Presidency In Four Years

by dday

George Steph on how to properly punch hippies:

Here are the five key sets of questions they have to confront, both in the Roosevelt Room and in their consultations with Congress:

1. What is “death with dignity” for the public option? Is it better for the president to sacrifice it himself? Or convince Democratic leaders behind closed doors to come to him? Some will argue for taking the public option issue to the floor, passing it through the House and sacrificing it in conference — but once you’ve gone that far, it may be impossible for House Democrats to back down. So, giving it up on the front end in some fashion is likely the preferred option.

2. How do you get the price tag down, likely to about $700 billion? At that cost the most unpopular tax increases will not be necessary. And moderates in both the House and Senate have already signaled that they can live with it at that level. Which leads to question 3:

3. Can you still make a convincing case that the country is on a path to universal coverage? What mix of phase-ins and triggers are necessary to make that case?

I can’t take it. (If you’re interested, 4 asks if any Republican votes other than Olympia Snowe can be gathered – even the White House knows that answer is no – and 5 queries how to do the speech, possibly with a joint session to Congress.)

Stephanopoulos is very plugged in, and so this could very well be the discussion at the White House. Who apparently have yet to figure out that forcing millions of Americans into buying crappy insurance that can only come from private industry will be so massively unpopular that, if Republicans don’t repeal it, Democrats will be forced to themselves. That would be the quickest and easiest way to squander the majority possible, which at times I think is the Washington Democratic establishment’s metier.

Number two is arguably scarier. Practically all of the money spent in this health care bill goes to two things – expanding Medicaid and subsidies for individuals to buy insurance. That’s it. Reducing the cost of the bill either keeps more people off Medicaid or reduces the subsidies, making forced insurance under an individual mandate unaffordable. There’s this notion that bloggers and progressive groups don’t care about the poor, but we’re not writing the bill, and kowtowing to the lunatic moderates who put a price tag above morality except when talking about war. I have understood that the coverage expansion elements of the bill were crucially important, and the same thinking that artificially lowered the stimulus cost to the detriment of state budgets and public investment would doom the coverage expansion elements.

And after all that, after assuring us that the wise course would be to ditch a public insurance option that would only exist to cut costs, and reducing the coverage expansion funds and subsequently putting the burden of universal coverage on the backs of poor people, Stephanopoulos asks, basically, “How can we lie about this to the public?”

I find it hard to believe that the White House would be so stupid as to think that making the least popular choices to the majority of Americans making under $50,000-$60,000/year would be just the ticket to increase the President’s popularity. Actually, just kidding, I don’t find it so hard.

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Simply The Best

by digby

Senator Saxby Chambliss:

“This country has the best health care in the world and the best health insurance in the world, but we can still improve it and make it better.”

American health insurance far outstrips other countries’ health insurance. (At least if you’re a stockholder, which must be what Saxby’s talking about here.)

He also said this:

He said he does not support any bill that interferes with the relationship between a patient and a doctor.

“Every individual has the right to choose their own doctor and that’s why I’m opposed to universal health care,” Chambliss said. “There will come a point where the right to choose your own doctor will be made by the government and not the individual, and that is fundamentally wrong.”

But it’s obviously ok for our great health insurance companies to tell us which doctors we can choose — and nobody minds because they know their insurance company is the best. If my doctor isn’t on their list, it’s no problem at all because I’m sure they’ll find me a good one. After all, there are no insurance companies better than them in the whole wide world and it’s very important that we keep them that way. Indeed, it would be very bad for the health of the insurance industry to second guess them about such things.

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“corpus delicti”

by digby

Former prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse points out the obvious to anyone who lives in the real world:

The prosecutor is often first presented with a case as a “corpus delicti” — a bullet-riddled body in the street, for instance. That ordinarily is enough to justify investigation. Through investigation, the evidence may prove that there was not in fact a crime (it was a suicide or an accident) or that the fatal acts were privileged or enjoy a legal defense (self-defense or justifiable shooting by an officer of the law). But one begins by investigation.

The judicial branch (which, under Marbury v. Madison, has the ultimate duty to determine “what the law is”) has determined that waterboarding is torture (see U.S. v. Lee, decided in 1984 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit). The Bush administration has admitted to waterboarding captives. The corpus delicti of that crime exists. For there to be investigation now is unexceptional.

The only exceptional thing is the parties involved: the former vice president of the United States, his counsel David Addington, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo and their private contractors Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, psychologists who designed the torture program. But in America, high office does not put one outside the law. Indeed, it borders on unethical for a prosecutor to refuse to investigate the corpus delicti of a crime because of concern as to where the evidence may lead.

With the corpus delicti present, a prosecutor looks to see whether theories of criminal liability can be eliminated by evidence the investigation reveals (a suicide note in the pocket, a police officer’s convincing description of a “clean shoot”). But as long as a viable theory of criminal liability remains, the investigation continues.

Hence the question: Looking only at the evidence that has become public so far, is there a viable theory of criminal liability arising out of this corpus delicti, the torture of America’s captives?

He goes on to lay out the possibilities and says, unsurprisingly, yes and that investigation is warranted.

But you don’t have to be a former prosecutor to know that. You only have to be a person who lives in the United States, where investigations are launched every day against average citizens on the basis of virtually nothing.

We know what’s happening here. Dick Cheney and his Republican allies are saying that if they are investigated they will launch a jihad against this administration once they retake power that will make previous witch hunts look like ring around the rosie.

My only question is why anyone thinks they won’t do it anyway?

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Oh, Here’s A New Idea

by digby

I just love it when some “top officials” in the White House run to the press to telegraph their plans to screw their most ardent supporters. It only happens in Democratic administrations, so it’s rare, but it looks like we may be about to see more of this treat in the future:

Top officials privately concede the past six weeks have taken their toll on Obama’s popularity. But the officials also see the new diminished expectations as an opportunity to prove their critics wrong by signing a health care law, showing progress in Afghanistan, and using this month’s anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers to push for a crackdown on Wall Street. On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.

This makes perfect sense because his problem is that he’s been kow-towing to the left so much that he’s lost the country, what with all the war crimes investigations, the tax hikes for the rich, the crackdown on the banks, the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” and the thumbing of his nose at the Republicans every chance he gets. Not to mention the plans for full withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan by 2012 and his full blown assault on the health care industry and insistence on a Canadian style health care system. You’d think Obama would have been far, far more cautious so as not to give the Republican freakshow any possible path to demonize them as “far left.” It’s not like they could just make stuff up and a lot of people in America would believe it, right?

And let’s face facts, no president ever lost the good opinion of the village once he triangulated and Sistah Soljahed and “stared down his own party.” Unless you count Johnson, Carter and Clinton, of course. Running that game is such a tried and true road to either a one term presidency or an impeachment that it’s hard to believe the Republicans don’t do the same thing.

Obviously, we don’t know if this article is correct or if the “top official” is floating a trial balloon or simply trying to affect the debate inside the White House. (Again, the conventions of American journalism require that we sift through the runes to actually figure out what’s going on.) But taking this official at his word that he speaks for the White House on this matter, I can’t say I would be surprised if this were the consensus. It’s the kind of thing I’ve seen Democrats do as long as I can remember.

It will be bad enough if Obama capitulates on health care and tries to sell it as a victory. If he also ostentatiously dismisses his base to show he can “stare down his own party” the only celebrations he sees will be held on K Street and Wall Street. The Republicans won’t participate, of course. The liberals he armtwists will resent him for forcing them to walk the plank with their own voters. His base will be demoralized and verging on active hostility. The mythical “center” will shrug their shoulders and move on to the next issue. (They are, by their own definition, disloyal.) Only the Blue Dog and DLC politicians who got paid by the medical industry will happily stand by his side at the signing ceremony, with visions of lobbyist cash dancing in their heads. I hope he really, really likes them because they will be the only enthusiastic supporters he has left after this.

I have a question: is it true that Real Americans greatly admire politicians who loathe their own supporters and publicly and repeatedly kick them once they obtain office? I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but it seems that the Democrats are convinced of it. It’s an interesting psychology, to say the least, but one which I have never understood.

Update: Keep in mind that it ain’t over til it’s over. Obama is worried about his approval ratings, but he’s not stupid. He sees the same legislative roadblocks that everyone else sees and has to realize by now that the path to health care is through the Democratic Party alone. And that means the liberal are still in play whether he likes it or not.

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Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Peggy Noonan wrote this:

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot.

A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human beings–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

There seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology on TV. People with no food and water who are walking into supermarkets and taking food and water off the shelves are not criminal, they are sane. They are not looters, they are people who are attempting to survive; they are taking the basics of survival off shelves in stores where there isn’t even anyone at the cash register.

Looters are not looking to survive; they’re looking to take advantage of the weakness of others. They are predators. They’re taking not what they need but what they want. They are breaking into stores in New Orleans and elsewhere and stealing flat screen TVs and jewelry, guns and CD players. They are breaking into homes and taking what those who have fled trustingly left behind. In Biloxi, Miss., looters went from shop to shop. “People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they’re Santa Claus,” the owner of a Super 8 Motel told the London Times. On CNN, producer Kim Siegel reported in the middle of the afternoon from Canal Street in New Orleans that looters were taking “everything they can.”

If this part of the story grows–if cities on the gulf come to seem like some combination of Dodge and the Barbarian invasion–it’s going to be bad for our country. One of the things that keeps us together, and that lets this great lumbering nation move forward each day, is the sense that we will be decent and brave in times of crisis, that the fabric holds, that under duress it is American heroism and altruism that take hold and not base instincts born of irresponsibility, immaturity and greed.

We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down their stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades.

I wonder if the cruel and stupid young people who are doing the looting know the power they have to damage their country. I wonder, if they knew, if they’d stop it.

Noonan sure had the right culprits pegged, didn’t she?

Not that she was entirely wrong. Our national spirit was permanently damaged all right, by the cruel and stupid people who failed to do their jobs, at least partially because of hyperbolic fantasies such as this one. They flew all over the national media as overstimulated wingnuts like Noonan got excited at the prospect of “cruel and stupid” young men rampaging about in New Orleans like animals — where, oddly, cameras were everywhere but nobody got any pictures of it.

We will never know what would have happened if the authorities hadn’t been hesitant to enter the city with less than an army to help them shoot the non-existent rampaging mobs of young (black) men, as Noonan casually said needed to be done. But it isn’t hard to imagine that they would have at least let the Red Cross into the city before thousands of people were left stranded for days without food and water.

The people who went crazy weren’t the victims of the hurricane. They pretty much kept it together. It was the febrile wingnuts with night terrors of marauding gangs destroying civilization as we know it who lost their minds.

It later turned out that most of those left in the city were poor young mothers, their children and old people, not that it mattered. By the time everyone figured that out, they were living in a breakdown of civilization of another kind altogether.

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