Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Barbourous Jerk

Everyone has undoubtedly seen that dramatic and heartbreaking footage of Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press yesterday. But I wonder if most people saw Haley Barbour directly afterward. He completely ignored Broussard’s emotional plea and implied in a particularly unctuous tone that something was wrong with Louisiana because everything was going very well in Mississippi:

MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody’s coming to get us. Nobody’s coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody’s promised. They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

Governor Barbour, can you bring our audience up to date on what is happening in your state, how many deaths have you experienced and what do you see playing out over the next couple days?

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR, (R-MS): Well, we were ground zero of the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. And it’s not just a calamity on our Gulf Coast, which is decimated, I mean, destroyed, all the infrastructure overwhelmed. We have damage 150 miles inland. We have 100 miles inland, 12 deaths from winds over 110 miles an hour.

Saturday night before this storm hit, the head of the National Hurricane Center called me and said, “Governor, this is going to be like Camille.” I said, “Well, start telling people it’s going to be like Camille,” because Camille is the benchmark for how bad–it’s the worst hurricane that ever hit America, it happened to hit Pass Christian, Mississippi. Well, Tim, Katrina was worse than Camille. It was worse than Camille in size. It was worse than Camille in damage. And so we’ve had a terrible, grievous blow struck us.

But my experience is very different from Louisiana, apparently. I don’t know anything about Louisiana. Over here, we had the Coast Guard in Monday night. They took 1,700 people off the roofs of houses with guys hanging off of helicopters to get them. They sent us a million meals last night because we’d eaten everything through. Everything hasn’t been perfect here, by any stretch of the imagination, Tim. But the federal government has been good partners to us. They’ve tried hard. Our people have tried hard. Firemen and policemen and emergency medical people, National Guard, highway patrolmen working virtually around the clock, sleeping in their cars when they could sleep. And we’ve made progress every day.

So, basically he said that Mississippi was getting the help it needed early on. I wonder if Mississippians agree with that?

Well, no, apparently not:

In a sign of the political pressure facing Bush, Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott, a former Senate majority leader, said he has been battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its Mississippi counterpart for help for his state and urged Bush to cut red tape.

After a one-on-one meeting with Bush in Poplarville, Lott said: “I am demanding help for the people of Mississippi to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.”

Haley Barbour is hitching his wagon to Bush and it makes sense. He’s really never been anything but a political hack. But if things aren’t going as well in Mississippi as he says it is — and I doubt it is — then he’s playing with fire. I’d put my money on Lott. I have a suspicion that he understands the zeitgeist a little bit better that Barbour does.

…there are critics, particularly Jackson residents who are desperate for gasoline, and country folk still forced to scrounge for food and clean water in a world without electricity. And, there are those who say Barbour may have been too soft on early evacuation decisions.

The gulf coast was devastated. And people there are feeling overlooked in the shadow of the horrors of New Orleans. It’s going to take a long time to re-build and things will not go completely smoothly. If people get impatient with this endless happy talk coming out of Barbour and the rest of the Republican leadership, there could be hell to pay. They’d better hope that Bush can deliver.

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Faith Based Disaster Relief

If I am confirmed, I will pay special attention to volunteers and non-governmental organizations responding to disasters. Fire fighters are frequently the first to respond to a disaster. Faith-based groups like the Salvation Army play critical roles in disaster relief, as does the American Red Cross. And the individual actions of neighbors helping neighbors by donating time, food, and clothing should never be underestimated. These are the people who make a vital difference, without any expectation of thanks or recognition.

Joseph Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s campaign manager at his confirmation hearing to be head of FEMA, February 13, 2001.

The government’s job is to give money and recognition to charity organizations, not to actually do anything except encourage people to start a telephone prayer tree or squeeze their eyes shut tight and wish with everything they have not to die. After all, everybody wants the government out of their lives.

This is clearly the philosophy of FEMA under George W. Bush, his campaign manager and his campaign manager’s roommate “Brownie.” In other words, put your head between your legs and kiss you ass good-bye suckers. We aren’t in the business of federal disaster relief.

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Deadly PR Stunt

Arthur has posted a couple of awful, frustrating stories. There are so many.

This little detail, however, stands out:

…for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.

Has anyone else heard that?

I suppose that as long as he wasn’t getting a haircut that caused no inconvenience whatsoever, no one will cause a stink. But, let’s face facts. This was a photo op for purely political purposes. There was nothing he couldn’t have seen by simply turning on television over the last 5 days. People were dying out there.

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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.

Update: For the record, that comment and all the others shown on Corrente are not made by Jane Galt herself. They are comments from her readers. I’m not sure what that says about her, but the post to which this is attached seems to have been written by a member of the human species.

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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 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.

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.

Update: Crooks and Liars has the video.

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Priorities

This is going to be a problem:

Vines also said U.S. troops in Iraq whose family members were injured or killed by Hurricane Katrina may be allowed to go home, but those who have no confirmed casualties among family members will have to stay in Iraq.

If their families are mere refugees, I guess it’s tough shit.

They could come home if Jonah Goldberg and his friends took their place, though. Surely they’ll be willing to make that sacrifice, right?

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Dithering or Scared?

For three days, Corps officials had lamented the difficulty of gaining access to the canal, but yesterday a local contractor, Boh Bros. Construction Co., apparently drove to the mouth of the canal and started placing a set of steel sheet pilings to isolate the canal from the lake. This job was finished yesterday afternoon.

What’s the deal? Aren’t engineers usually pretty good at figuring out how to get into inaccessible places?

I wonder if maybe they were actually all askeered of the roving thugs that seem to have been reported everywhere, but rarely seen? A number of reports in today’s newspapers are much more skeptical of the criminal anarchy that was reported all day yesterday. It was more than a little bit odd that the news crews that had access all over the city weren’t able to get any pictures of these roving gangs of beasts that were said to be stalking everyone.

It’s not that I doubt that there was a lot of criminal activity. People both evil and desperate become barbaric when the social order breaks down. But the stories sound an awful lot like the tall tales we’ve heard for centuries in this country about barbaric slave revolts. It’s like a tick that comes back whenever people see large numbers of poor, angry black people.

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Press Conference

Still making excuses. Still being an asshole. Nobody had the balls to ask him why he was fucking around in Coronado, California with country music stars while the levees were overflowing. It wouldn’t be polite, I guess. Too bad he wasn’t getting a blow job — they would have been all over it.

Has everyone noticed that Bush seems to be saying that “Haley” handled his disaster better than Louisiana? (Mostly by being “ruthless” I would guess.)

I’ve been thinking these last two days that we may just see Haley Barbour being the anointed Bush successor after this. Peggy Nooner was gushing all over him yesterday. Bush doesn’t have enough good things to say about him. And Larry King has been delivering spectacular sycophancy to him every night. Southern governor and a big money lobbyist/political hack both. Other than the fact that he’s not physically fit, he’s Bush’s wet dream.

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Blame The Victim Talking Points

I heard this shocking exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie MacIntyre lst 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…

But I think there is more to it. Everyone has noted that Michael Brown (the estate planning lawyer/Bush crony who is in charge of the biggest logistical challenge in FEMA’s history) was making the rounds implying that the victims asked for what they got when they didn’t obey the mandatory evacuation. But he wasn’t the only one who said this explicitly. I wrote yesterday that Michael Chertoff, his boss, said the same thing:

“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.”

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.

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Disaster Pageant

Is it really appropriate for all these disaster officials to be on television pretending to be “briefing” the president (who is dressed in his campaign costume) so that he can appear to be engaged in the problem? Don’t they have better things to do than raise Bush’s poll numbers?

Now he’s “going to go comfort some people.” Who says he isn’t doing his job?

Update: Well, waddaya know. The next pictures we see are of Bush “comforting” a pretty young black woman and her white husband(?) They were very good. Must have had an awesome audition to make it onto “Presidential Kabuki: In Excess.”

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