Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“We Always Worried This Would Happen”: One Year Ago Today

by digby

“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is that 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 [chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.” Barbara Bush, September 4, 2005

One year ago today, most of New Orleans had finally been evacuated. But the reality of what had happened during those few days was still sinking in. The far right web sites were full of stories of everything from child rape to necrophilia.

Here’s the Council of Conservative Citizen’s web site:

Updates! Eyewitness accounts report that at least six people have been murdered inside the superdome. One dozen or more have been raped. Most of the rape victims are very young. A seven year old girl, an eight year old boy, and numerous teenage girls. The US media is extremely reluctant to report any of this because of political correctness!

The mainstream press was starting to report things like this:

BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

“Because of the riots,” the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.

“It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”

We heard about people “shitting where they stood” and found out that large number of evacuees had been denied the ability to try to walk out of New Orleans after days went by and they became increasingly desperate. One year ago tonight, Ray Nagin went on Nightline and said this:

JOHN DONOVAN, ABC NEWS: The last thing I want to ask you about is the race question.

So, I’m out at the highway — it was last Thursday — huge number of people stuck in the middle of nowhere. Jesse Jackson comes in, looks at the scene, and says it looks like the scene of a, from a slave ship. And I said, “Reverand Jackson,, the imagery suggests you’re saying this is about race.” And he didn’t answer directly, he said, “Take a look at it, what do you think it’s about?”

What’s your response to that?

RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: (Sighs) You know, I haven’t really thought much about the race issue. I will tell you this. I think it’s, it could be, but it’s a class issue for sure. Because I don’t think this type of response would have happened if this was Orange County, California. This response definitely wouldn’t have happened if it was Manhattan, New York. And I don’t know if it’s color or class.

DONOVAN: In some way, you think that New Orleans got second-class treatment.

NAGIN: I can’t explain the response. And here’s what else I can’t explain: We are basically, almost surrounded by water. To the east, the bridge is out, you can’t escape. Going west, you can’t escape because the bridge is under water. We found one evacuation route, to walk across the Crescent City Connection, on the overpass, down Highway 90 to 310 to I10, to go get relief.

People got restless and there was overcrowding at the convention center. They asked us, “Is there any other option?” We said, “Well, if you want to walk, across the Crescent City Connection, there’s buses coming, you may be able to find some relief.” They started marching. At the parish line, the county line of Gretna, they were met with attack dogs and police officers with machine guns saying “You have to turn back…”

DONOVAN: Go back.

NAGIN: “…because a looter got in a shopping center and set it afire and we want to protect the property in this area.”

DONOVAN: And what does that say to you?

NAGIN: That says that’s a bunch of bull. That says that people value their property, and were protecting property, over human life.

And look, I was not suggesting, or suggesting to the people that they walk down into those neighborhoods. All I wanted them to do and I suggested: walk on the Interstate. And we called FEMA and we said “Drop them water and supplies as they march.” They weren’t gonna go into those doggone neighborhoods. They weren’t going to impact those neighborhoods. Those people were looking to escape, and they cut off the last available exit route out of New Orleans.

DONOVAN: And was that race? Was that class?

NAGIN: I don’t know. You’re going to have to go ask them. But those questions need to be answered. And I’m pissed about it. And I don’t know how many people died as a result of that.

We later got a very vivid first hand report of that night from two paramedics who had been in New Orleans for a convention and couldn’t evacuate. I first read about it on Making Light:

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

[…]

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

A lot of people said this story could not be believed because it was written by two socialists from San Francisco. The account was later verified by numerous others, including the police chief of Gretna, who said:

Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.

[…]

“If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged.”

Part of the reason for this was that from the beginning the primary concern for many was protecting property, not saving people. As I mentioned last week, the morning he got back to Washington, having had to cut his precious vacation short two days, the president on the United States went on television:

He also warned Gulf Coast residents, including those searching for water and food, not to break into businesses or commit other crimes during the crisis.

“There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this,” Bush said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“If people need water and food, we’re going to do everything we can to get them water and food,” Bush added. “It’s very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand, so people don’t exploit the vulnerable.”

At the same time:

The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans,” said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.

“Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at the table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders.”

Though frustrated, Hosler understood the reasons. The goal is to move people out of an uninhabitable city, and relief operations might keep them there. Security is so bad that she fears feeding stations might get ransacked.

That fear came from the other reports of the crisis, reports like the one that had the rightwing frothing in a complete frenzy over events at different bridge — the alleged “gun battle” at the Danziger Bridge. Guess what:

Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department’s resolve to take back the streets.

But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city’s east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.

A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.

The two families — one from New Orleans East and solidly middle class, the other poorer and rooted in the Lower 9th Ward — have offered only preliminary information about what they say happened that day. Large gaps remain in the police and civilian accounts of the incident.

News of the Danziger Bridge shootings roared across cable television for a time. But as with many overblown reports of crime and violence immediately after the hurricane, the facts remain elusive.

More recent reports show that at least one of the alleged “thugs” was an unarmed mentally challenged man who was shot in the back five times.

But it was earlier stories of similar lawlessness that led George W. Bush and others to order this — and make the rescue workers wait until it was in place before they could go in to provide food and water:

Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Jones said the military first needs to establish security throughout the city. Military and police officials have said there are several large areas of the city are in a full state of anarchy

Completely untrue.

Then there were the tales of depravity at the Superdome and the Convention Center which were reported as fact by the media:

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people,” Amoss said, “it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”

Some of the hesitation that journalists might have had about using the more sordid reports from the evacuation centers probably fell away when New Orleans’ top officials seemed to confirm the accounts.

Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass appeared on “Oprah” a few days after trouble at the Superdome had peaked.

Compass told of “the little babies getting raped” at the Superdome. And Nagin made his claim about hooligans raping and killing.

State officials this week said their counts of the dead at the city’s two largest evacuation points fell far short of early rumors and news reports. Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

(National Guard officials put the body count at the Superdome at six, saying the other four bodies came from the area around the stadium.)

Of the 841 [now more than twice that number] recorded hurricane-related deaths in Louisiana, four are identified as gunshot victims, Johannessen said. One victim was found in the Superdome but was believed to have been brought there, and one was found at the Convention Center, he added.

I wrote a lot about a particular form of racism — fear of the black mob — in the weeks after Katrina. I’m sure there will be many academic tomes written devoted to sorting out how this unfolded and why. But there is no doubt that it happened: we watched it in real time as the law ‘n order right reflexively called for looters to be shot on sight in the opening moments of the crisis; as the president issued stern warnings that victims were not to break into businesses for food and water (even as the red cross was told not to bring in food and water because it was unsafe); as the press reported blacks as “looting” and whites as “finding,” and as ever more bizarre rumors of violence and depravity were reported as fact.

Over and over again the fearful lizard brain of the racist mind was inundated with pictures of black people in large numbers in one place and instead of being able to interpret what they were actually seeing — mostly desperate women, children and elderly people who had been cast into a living nightmare — they were afraid. And being afraid, they delayed and dithered and then overreacted until on the final night, as thousands and thousands of people were trapped, thirsty and hungry, living in unimaginable filth having waited minute by minute for a rescue that never came, some of them took matters into their own hands and tried to walk out of that nightmare. They were stopped by men with guns on a bridge.

People will argue that this was an issue of poverty and class, and it surely was. But the assumptions that were made by officials and the press and many people around the nation were knee jerk reactions to African American crime — assumptions that have been successfully exploited by the rightwing for many moons and which never fail to rise up in a situation like this.

Some people tried to raise the consciousness of the media about this at the time. Rick Perlstein wrote an excellent op-ed piece on the subject that was turned down by all the major newspapers. They didn’t want to hear it.

The failures of Katrina cannot be attributed solely to racism, of course. There are many, many reasons for it. But when you look back from the distance of one year on, I think it’s clearer than ever that an irrational, primitive fear of unruly, criminal African Americans contributed hugely to the way that the evacuation was handled — and that some officials like Nagin and Compass contributed by spreading the rumors of violence and giving it official credibility, probably because they thought that it would spur the response rather than delay it.

Deep down, for a lot of people, it’s quite simple:

“It’s the blacks. We always worried this would happen.”

.

Labor Day Thoughts

by poputonian

A few short extracts from Vonnegut’s book A Man Without a Country for some Labor Day thinking:

Most Americans don’t know what the socialists did during the first half of the past century with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.
…
“Socialism” is no more an evil word than “Christianity.” Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
…
Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.

As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn’t you like to say, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

And so on

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!
..
I did get to know one socialist … Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. He was a typical Hoosier idealist, like Debs, was a middle-class person who thought there could be more economic justice in this country. He wanted a better country, that’s all.

After graduating from Harvard, he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.

Hapgood’s family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis, and when Powers Hapgood inherited it, he turned it over to the employees, who ruined it.

We met in Indianapolis after the end of the Second World War. He had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he was testifying about it in court, and the judge stops everything and asks him, “Mr. Hapgood, here you are, you’re a graduate of Harvard. Why would anyone with your advantages choose to live as you have?” Hapgood answered the judge: “Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, Sir.”

Happy Labor Day!
Buy A Man Without A County from Seven Stories Press.

Subscribe to In These Times here.

We Are All Sprezzatura Now

by digby

Oh my. Lee Siegel has been dethroned. I once resigned from the blogofascist empire in deference to the Great Man and was only persuaded to return so that I might blog in the grand Siegellian tradition and teach those worthless young would-be writers from knock-about origins a thing or two about culture and talent. Now he is gone and I am adrift. Should I stay and carry on the fight? Or should I leave again in solidarity with my mentor, brother and inspiration?

While I ponder the thought of an internet without Lee Siegel, in honor of the Great Man, I’d like to remind you blogofascists of what you’ll be missing:

You’d think that staring into the mirror and repeating your name over and over would have the opposite effect of helping you get out of yourself, but that’s not the case. The idea is to find a place so deep inside yourself that, with intense concentration, you look to yourself like a stranger. Your very name becomes an alien phrase. Physically, you start to seem imaginary. Spiritually, you start to seem more real. Hoffenshtoffen suggests keeping a packed suitcase standing in the middle of your apartment as a symbolic reminder of that magical fulfillment, self-surrender, when you leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world.

Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But extricating oneself from oneself is the great problem of human life. Buddha’s name for the smothering, clamoring self was “desire”; Plato’s was “appetite”; Rousseau’s was “reason.” (The translations are Sylvester Cointreau’s.) William James, my favorite American writer, wearily wrote to a friend toward the end of his life that the human ego had begun to repel him. I sort of feel like that sometimes. That’s why, more and more, I love the sound of laughter. Not withering, or cruel, or exclusive, knowing laughter. I mean ego-bursting laughter that is like wisdom speaking in slang.

So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lip, but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I’ve inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant “There’s a call for you,” and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.

Nobody does it better. Adieu, dear friend, adieu.

.

Frank Rich September 18, 2005, Sunday

“ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum’s mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.”

Graphic by Dena

Speechless

by digby

LIMBAUGH: I love these kinds of stories, ’cause we’re just getting them all over the place: Waistlines continue to grow in the United States. Another crisis story here, ladies and gentlemen, from our old buddies at the Associated Press. “The gravy train — make that the sausage, biscuits, and gravy train — just keep [sic] on rolling in most of America last year.” Thirty-one states showing an increase in obesity. Mississippi continued to lead the way; an estimated 30 percent of adults there are considered obese, an increase of 1.1 percentage points when compared with last year’s report. Indeed, “the five states with the highest obesity rates are Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Kentucky — exhibit much higher rates of poverty than the national norm. Meanwhile, the five states with the lowest obesity have less poverty. They are Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont.”

[…]

LIMBAUGH: I think you might then say that the obesity crisis could be the fault of government, liberal government. Food stamps, all those — you know, I’m gonna tell you people a story. I — just, well, the government, you could say, is killing these people because we know obesity kills, and the government’s killing the poor. The Bush administration is killing the poor with too much food.

Notice that the Bush administration is now “liberal government,” and that he fails to acknowledge the fact that the poorest states are all Republican.

I won’t even mention the irony of a guy like Limbaugh — who makes more than 25 million a year — talking about obesity being caused by poverty.

.

“You’re Doin’ A Heckuva Job Brownie:” One Year Ago Today

by digby

Bush congratulated Brownie even though he had just viewed a DVD with highlights of horrors on the ground on AF One as he made his way to the Gulf for the above photo-op:

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

A group of 1,000 firefighters convened in Atlanta to volunteer with the Katrina relief efforts. Of those, “a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.”

Rove took over handling the crisis and immediately got to work on the most important priority:

In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.

”The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,” Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. ”The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”

That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.

In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.

Mr. Bush’s communications director, Nicolle Devenish, was married this weekend in Greece, and a number of Mr. Bush’s political advisers — including Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman — attended the wedding.

Ms. Rice did not return to Washington until Thursday, after she was spotted at a Broadway show and shopping for shoes, an image that Republicans said buttressed the notion of a White House unconcerned with tragedy.

These officials said that Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of the situation’s political ramifications. As is common when this White House confronts a serious problem, management was quickly taken over by Mr. Rove and a group of associates including Mr. Bartlett. Neither man responded to requests for comment.

The first official talking point, however, was to blame the victims. I wrote that morning:

I heard this shocking exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie MacIntyre last night too, and was stunned. There is clearly a culture of pass-the-buck whining about military failure taking over the Pentagon if their first reaction is to complain about partisanship…this was an official talking point. On Thursday, September 1st, three days after the scope of the disaster was well known, George W. Bush sent his disaster officials out to the media with the instructions that they were to blame the victims — the same day that we were seeing dead bodies and dehydrated children all over our television sets.

Here’s the exchange I was talking about:

MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn’t move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.

And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.

And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn’t really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.

BROWN: Yes, I mean, I’m glad you told us that. And they have every right to believe they believe and think the way they think. I mean, and I mean that. But you’ve got people who have been living as refugees. It is not hard to understand why our first heart beat goes in their direction. We’ll worry about the bureaucrats later.

That night, I watched in abject horror as Shepard Smith and Geraldo on Fox Newsof all places, reported on conditions so horrible that you could not believe it was America in 2005. I wrote:

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 pussified 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.

[…]

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.

Watch it again over at Crooks and Liars. It’s still hard to believe.

Meanwhile, over at 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…

Of course, nobody actually “saw” any of this, because it didn’t happen.

This was the night that they turned people away at gunpoint on the bridge to Gretna.

More on that tomorrow.

It was a heckuva day.

.

Southern Liberty – The Ugly Side

by poputonian

Earlier I referenced the book Liberty and Freedom in which the author, David Hackett Fischer, differentiates the meanings of the words liberty and freedom. He first describes a simplistic , libertarian definition wherein each word implies “a power of choice, an ability to exercise one’s will.” This definition, if acted out, lends advantage to people of privilege and means. As I indicated before, however, Fischer goes how to describe other ways in which the original meanings of liberty and freedom were distinct from one another:

“Liberty … meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint … to loosen a set of bonds … the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct … not ruled by another’s will … some degree of separation and independence.”
…
“Freedom has another origin … which meant dear or beloved … someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”
…
“In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.”

Fischer goes on to lay down what I think is a very sharp demarkation between responsible Americans on the one hand, and unfeeling libertarians and libertines, the President included, on the other:

“It is interesting (and urgently important for us to understand in the modern world) that these ancient traditions of liberty and freedom both entailed obligations and responsibilities. But they did so differently. The gift of [liberty] brought with it an obligation to act in a wise and responsible way–not as a libertine. A person with liberty was responsible for his own acts.”

“A person who was born to freedom in an ancient tribe had a sacred obligation to serve and support the folk, and to keep the customs of a free people, and to respect the rights of others on pain of banishment. In modern America too many people have forgotten this side of our inheritance. They think of liberty as license without responsibility, and freedom as entitlement without obligation. To think this in the modern world is to remember only half of these ancient traditions.”

All of the above was included in Fischer’s introduction. Six-hundred pages and many essays later he penned the following composition. Long time readers of Hullabaloo will recognize its theme as one contained in more than a few of Digby’s previous posts:

Massive Resistance
White Citizens Councils and Visions of Southern Liberty

States Rights and Southern Liberty
Impeach Earl Warren.
—-Southern Bumper Sticker

In the deep south, many whites turned strongly against civil rights. The result was a fierce collision between two social movements. Once again, as so often before in America, each side passionately believed that it was the true defender of liberty and freedom. The conservative reaction began to grow immediately after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1954. It kept on growing through the late 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Moderate politicians fell silent. Even Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy kept very quiet and failed to give the country the leadership it needed in a critical moment. Eisenhower reluctantly enforced integration decisions but told his friends that the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice was the greatest mistake of his career. Kennedy was appalled by the violence of the white southerners against the first Freedom Riders in 1961 and sent six hundred federal marshals to Alabama after southern leaders refused to restore order. But he also tried to shut down the Freedom Marches and sent a peremptory order to his civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford. “Call it off!” President Kennedy demanded. “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses.” Kennedy felt that the Freedom Rides were “embarrassing” before his Summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In another episode, African diplomats on the road between Washington and New York complained of Jim Crow in restaurants along Maryland highways. President Kennedy replied, “Tell them to fly!”

With those attitudes in the Oval Office during the presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy, and with open encouragement for massive resistance from southern governors such as Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama, smoldering pockets of southern racism suddenly burst into flame. White supremacy organizations multiplied below the Mason-Dixon line. The Ku Klux Klan became active again. These groups turned to terror and violence as a tool for crippling the civil rights movement. Arsonists burned black churches and Jewish synagogues. Assassins murdered civil rights leaders. Bombs killed and maimed black children in schools and homes. This violence was done with strong support from some wealthy and powerful people throughout the southern states.

The ideology of the southern conservative movement was cast in libertarian terms: liberty from the hated federal government and especially the Supreme Court; liberty from “outside agitators and “ni**er equality”; liberty for “states’ rights” and “southern rights.” Its rhetoric reached back to the iconography of southern independence in the Civil War. So also did its symbols. A modern revision of the old Confederate battle flag became the leading emblem of white supremacy and massive resistance. It claimed a kinship with Robert E. Lee, but this was not the old four-square “stainless banner” that had been carried with honor by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. This was something different, a twentieth-century polyester Jim Crow flag with rectangular proportions that were ironically closer to the Stars and Stripes than to the old Confederate battle flags. The southern flag of massive resistance was a new image, invented for a second civil war and quickly adopted by racist movements in many parts of the world.

The iconography of massive resistance was complex. An example appeared in a photograph by Cecil Williams of a run-down rural gas station at Sandy Run in Calhoun County, South Carolina. It served whites only; in some parts of the Deep South even gas pumps were segregated by race. The windows of the battered building bore many images: a devotional portrait of Jesus, a modern Jim Crow flag of massive resistance, angry bumper stickers for white supremacist candidates, and defiant racist slogans.

In the twentieth century, these symbols inspired a new civil war within the South. On one side were very angry southern whites who used extreme violence as an instrument of repression. The beatings and bombings and murders were mostly the work of downtrodden poor whites whose only claim to distinction was that they were not black. They were funded and protected by southern leaders of wealth and power.

On the other side were southern blacks and white liberals who chose the weapons of nonviolence during the 1950s and early 1960s, at a heavy cost but with ultimate success. These contending groups were very different in many ways, but the two warring southern movements for civil rights and white supremacy shared a common heritage. Both were were strongly Christian and evangelical and quoted the same Bible. Both had deep roots in American history and shared a strong sense of rights and entitlements. Both were very southern in speech and manner. But in other ways, the contrast could not have been more complete. Here was a collision of rage against reason, hatred against love, brutality against humanity, force against nonviolence. It was also a conflict of separation against integration, hierarchy against equality, and liberty against freedom.

Katrina’s roots.

One Year Ago Today

by digby

I am officially an idiot. (Not news to many of you, I’m sure.) I really believed that the duelling pageants would benefit the Democrats. I felt that the newer Katrina story, replete with horror stories of people still unable to go home, piles of rubble remaining on the streets, and journalists who saw themselves as the heroic center of the story last year would lead to a surfeit of Katrina stories that would rend the heart and remind everyone that Bush failed in his most basic mission — stepping in to help its citizens in a time of such great crisis that the normal functions of everyday life are disrupted. I was wrong.

After a series of perfunctory stories and a couple of plodding Bush speeches, the official anniversary is over.

Yet, it was exactly one year ago today that this was unfolding:

“Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, ‘How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!’”

While Condi was shoe shopping, we were all seeing this on our television screens:

President Bush appeared on Good Morning America that morning and made his famous statement “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” The Washington Post also reported Bush’s stern warning:

He also warned Gulf Coast residents, including those searching for water and food, not to break into businesses or commit other crimes during the crisis.

“There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this,” Bush said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“If people need water and food, we’re going to do everything we can to get them water and food,” Bush added. “It’s very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand, so people don’t exploit the vulnerable.”

The president of the United States “warned” people not to break into businesses for food and water. Can you imagine such a thing?

This kind of talk was rampant that day, and it resulted in delaying aid as relief workers and rescuers refused to enter the allegedly lawless city. It was later verified that this was almost all nonsense, which anyone could have guessed considering that there were cameras all over New Orleans and none of them were capturing any of this alleged violence. The only thing we saw was some casual looting in tennis shoe stores and Wal-Mart. But that didn’t stop the media from breathlessly reporting it as if it were true. And the rightwing ate it up.

Here was what Peggy Noonan was vomiting up that day:

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 being–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

[…]

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 there 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 was getting a little bit crispy by the time I read that and so I replied:

Yes, nothing must be allowed to blemish the steely-eyed rocket man’s moment of pulsating, wet-making glory.

Here are a couple of people you won’t have to waste a bullet on, you fucking privileged asshole:

Mu first post that morning, was this:

I don’t know if all of you have seen the footage today from the convention center in New Orleans, but it is shocking. There are dead bodies lying all over the place. People are waiting for help and the only people who’ve come in there are news crews and Harry Connick Jr. (And fuck you Michele Malkin.) It’s a living hell.

The MSNNC reporter just said that he counted 82 buses lined up outside the city waiting to go in to evacuate people from the convention center but they won’t go because they’ve been told it isn’t safe.

On 9/11 we had cops and firefighters running into collapsing buildings to rescue people. Today, days after the crisis hit, I’m watching people with little babies desperate for food and water and nobody is coming in to help them.

What in the hell is going on?

Perhaps this comment by Homeland Security chief Chertoff explains the Bush administration’s slow motion response:

“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”

For Christ’s sake the tourists couldn’t get out either. All the rental cars were booked and the airport was closed. Lucky for them, most of them were staying in high rise hotels and they rode out the storm. And now they have someplace to go — home. The locals who didn’t have cars aren’t quite so lucky, are they?

I think Chertoff’s comment says everything we need to know about how this government viewed this catastrophe. “We told ’em to get out; if they refused (or couldn’t) they brought this on themselves.” That’s the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. “You’re on your own, losers.”

I think Americans expect more of their government than that. That comment should be hung around the necks of these poor planning, corruption spreading, deficit spending, budget slashing, warwmongering, tax cutting assholes like a dead Louisiana pelican.

I’m even more angry about this than I was a year ago. Let’s hope most Americans are too and we tell these fearmongering bastards just what we think of them this November. This can’t ever be allowed to happen again.

* The second picture above is different from the one I originally posted of a man holding a baby standing next to the body of a dead man. I had linked to the yahoo site and I can’t locate it now.

Rising Above The Fray

by tristero

The other day, in flacking his upcoming addresses on the importance of sending more of America’s children home to their moms in body ba- sorry – transfer tubes for no reason whatsoever, Crawford’s Own Churchill said:

These are important times, and I seriously hope people wouldn’t politicize these issues I’m going to talk about…

The only sensible response is to repeat Dick Cheney’s immortal words:

Go fuck yourself.

The Faiths Of The Founding Fathers

by tristero

Most readers of blogs like this one know that the question “Was the US founded as a Christian nation?” is a joke. Not so many a newspaper editor or tv producer, who regularly permit the likes of James Dobson or Tim LaHaye to get away with asserting without contradiction that the founders were devout Christians. David L. Holmes’s happily concise new book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers should serve as a useful corrective. He doesn’t exactly come out and say that the christianists are lying about the religious beliefs of the Founders, but that’s only because he doesn’t have to. The facts he amasses speak for themselves. However, given the nearly telegraphic, dispassionate style of the book (it contains neither an introduction nor a final chapter to summarize and assess what’s discussed), some reading-betwixt-the-lines and deduction is called for, on occasion. The book is packed with information, but I’ll discuss only one part of it here, which I think is the core of the book.

What were the Founders’ faith? In a chapter amusingly entitled “A Layperson’s Guide to Distinguishing a Deist From an Orthodox Christian,” Holmes, a professor of Religious Studies at William and Mary, writes

The religious beliefs of the founders seem to have fallen into three categories: Non-Christian Deism, Christian Deism, and orthodox Christianity.

What’s Deism? Holmes quotes the immortal Tom Paine:

Its creed is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God and there it rests. It honours Reason [and] it avoids all presumptuous beliefs and rejects, as the fabulous inventions of men, all books pretending to revelation.

In his comments elsewhere, Holmes explicitly states that Deism cannot be considered a Christian religion as it rejects too much that is explicitly Christian, including the divine authority of the Bible. In other words, Deism’s pretty close to the bare minimum one can believe if one claims to be at all religious.

“Orthodox Christianity” is kind of a vague, catch-all term that includes both Roman Catholic and Protestant beliefs (it has nothing to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity; it refers to how closely a belief system cleaves to western Christian orthodoxy). Unlike, perhaps, “Orthodox Judaism,” a follower of orthodox Christianity in Holmes’s sense need not be especially devout or observant, but rather must simply accept as true at least some aspects of the New Testament or traditional Christian belief. For instance, if you accept Jesus’s divinity but not the doctrine of transubstantiation, you could be thought an orthodox Christian, according to the way Holmes uses it, as opposed to a radical Deist.

Occasionally, I’ve seen the term used by christianists to confuse people, but Holmes, who is no christianist, uses “orthodox Christian” in a very specfic way, essentially to differentiate styles (or depths) of Deistic belief. In other words, when it comes to the Founders, Deism is the normative religious belief system, not Christianity. Therefore, the concept of some kind of generalized “orthodox Christianity” is helpful, not in uniting Christians politically as the christianists desire, but solely in demonstrating how the Founders’ beliefs deviate from strictly defined Deism. The term simply serves Holmes’ purpose in pointing to ways that the Founders privileged the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible in various subtle, perhaps even unconscious, ways. As his book makes abundantly clear, nearly all of the major male figures involved in the Revolution were Deists.* However, it wasn’t a consistent or organized theology; almost by definition, it couldn’t be. Many of them went to at least some church services (even if they didn’t take Communion) or maintained ties to the church of their youth. Many, including Franklin, held to beliefs that, strictly speaking, weren’t reasonable but supernatural. These are, according to Holmes, intimations of Orthodox Christianity within their Deism. They modulate their Deism and give some of the Founder’s beliefs a “Christian Deist” bent. But that does not make them pious, devout, or practicing Christians. Holmes goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate that assertions of specifically Christian piety for many of the Founders are baseless.

The religious beliefs of the Founders were highly individualized, and often a contradictory muddle, like the beliefs of most Americans today, and quite unlike the sclerotic and highly politicized irrationalism of modern christianists. Indeed, after finishing Holmes’ book, one can’t escape the conclusion that the decision to omit explicitly Christian references from the Declaration of Independence (and insert explicitly Deistic ones) was deliberate and supported even by those Founders with radically different beliefs, such as Jefferson and Adams. Furthermore, the fact that God is not mentioned in the Constitution was also deliberate. “We forgot,” Hamilton once quipped. Well, perhaps they did, but certainly on purpose.

But as I read him, Holmes goes even further. It is abundantly clear from the structure of the book, only in the most general sense are the three categories Holmes proposes (Deist, Deist Christian, orthodox Christian) equally populated by influential Founders. In fact, most of the “orthodox Christians” were women who, like it or not, had no direct power.** In short, regarding religion, Christianity per se was important to the mindset of the most influential founders, but more important still was the non-Christian religion of Deism, which most believed to a greater or lesser extent.***

And so, once again, when one examines the hysterical debates perpetrated on the country by the extreme Right, there is no there there. Yes, of course, it is a mistake to equate the non-rigorous religious thinking of the Founders with atheism or “secularism.” But here’s the point: Holmes can’t find anyone important to quote who makes such a basic error, not even the “secular humanist” journal Free Inquiry. Yes, as quoted in Holmes’ book, Gordon C. Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, appears to overstate the case for the Founders’ disinterest in organized religion and belief. However, Holmes cites numerous cases of important figures in the Revolution who avoided religous confirmation or failed to mention the consolations of religion at moments of personal crisis. Conclusion: Wood certainly did not exaggerate by much.

On the other hand, the quotes Holmes provides from the christianist LaHaye’s writings – “even secular humanists would have to admit to the religious (particularly Christian) origins of this nation” – stands exposed as just so much wildly inaccurate blather. Far more important to the origins of “this nation” is the liberal project of the Enlightenment, particularly Deism and perhaps most importantly, the consummately Enlightenment values of religious freedom and toleration (not the same thing). These values, clearly at the core of nearly every Founders’ political credo, are nowhere close to being a central part of orthodox Christianity, where the divinity of Christ, belief in the Bible’s authority, and belief in the moral truth of Christ’s and Paul’s teachings hold sway.

Holmes’s book also has a notable Epilogue in which he briefly describes the religious life of every president from Ford to the present one. Most readers of this blog will probably find that he is grossly unfair to the Democrats.**** But what I also noticed was a much stronger level of criticism of Republicans (even of Reagan!) than is common in many books that examine religion and politics from a religious/evangelical perspective. And so, whatever reservations I might have about certain details, I couldn’t help concluding that the entire book was a stinging critique of the religous right, written in a non-polemical style to attract those people – such as network tv producers, Fox News types, and the more gullible segments of their audience – who may have been bamboozled into taking scoundrels like LaHaye, Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson as serious theologians or social commentators.

If you have any interest in the religious beliefs of the Founders or any doubt as to how idiotic the notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation really is, you really should pick up this short, and intelligently written, book.

*The three most notable exceptions in Holmes’ book were Samuel Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry. As was Elias Boudinot, the president of the Continental Congress and a foe of Paine’s. The presidents were all Deists of one stripe or another.

**Holmes provides several good reasons why a disparity of belief along gender lines occurred. What were they? Read the book (grin).

***Was the US founded as a Deist nation? That’s a slightly more interesting question, perhaps, than whether it was founded as Christian nation, but the answer is emphatically “no.” Holmes’s book makes clear that the Founders had as little interest in foisting Deism on Americans as they did Christianity. The US was established as a civil government that deliberately separated church from state. Duh.

**** He makes a minor error, neglecting to mention that William Sloane Coffin had no recollection of a conversation in which Bush claims that Reverend Coffin insulted his father. As discussed elsewhere, I go further that that and strongly suspect Bush was lying.

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