Year: 2005

Timing is Everything

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Six days after the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was on the scene, running 90 helicopter rescue and relief missions a day to the devastated region. “How’s that for stingy?” asks batshit crazy racist Michelle Malkin, pointing out all the nuclear-powered water and freshly-baked loaves of bread. High five! Mission Accomplished!

As of Friday, six days after the hurricane, four days after the total destruction of New Orleans, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman just left port in Virginia . It just left. It just pulled sllooowllly out of the fucking port. It. Just. Left. Maybe it’ll get there in a few. Hey, whatever.

Speaking of Harry S. Truman, funny thing — when the Soviets closed all ground travel to Berlin in 1948, it took less than three days for Truman to get loaded cargo planes from Alaska and Hawaii to FUCKING GERMANY. How long a flight is it from Crawford to Baton Rouge? Half a fucking hour? Make it 45 minutes if you stop for cake?

Just asking.

America

| c: News

Us:

We walk half a block down Royal Street from the Eighth District headquarters and come upon Brennan’s Restaurant, one of New Orleans’ most venerable dining institutions. The Brennans are a high-profile family of restaurateurs and run several of the highest-end eateries in town. Jimmy Brennan and a crew of his relatives are holing up in the restaurant along with the chef, Lazone Randolph. They are sleeping on air mattresses, drinking Cheval Blanc, and feasting on the restaurant’s reserves of haute Creole food.

The atmosphere in the French Quarter, while relatively quiet, is decidedly tense, but Brennan isn’t worried. “We’re not too concerned. The police let us go over to the Royal Omni, to take a shower, freshen up, and we cooked them some prime rib. We take care of them, they take care of us,” says Randolph. Two Brennan emissaries whisk past, bearing multilayer chocolate cakes, headed toward the precinct. “This has been working out real well for us,” says Jimmy Brennan.

Them:

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

“I don’t treat my dog like that,” Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “You can do everything for other countries, but you can’t do nothing for your own people.”

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday….

I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.

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No one anticipated the breach of the levees?

No one anticipated the fucking breach of the fucking levees???

The lake is now level with the city and the heavy lifting helicopters needed to fill the breach have not even arrived? Four days later?

The director of FEMA is an estate planning lawyer?

As of today, in the middle of the worst natural disaster in American history, Condolezza Rice is on vacation in New York, shopping for fucking shoes on fucking 5th Avenue?

What else is there to say…

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Yeah. He actually said it. No one anticipated the breech of the fucking leeves. “No one” apparently doesn’t include FEMA, who named it one of the most critical potential disasters in America, according to the nobodies at the New York Times, in 2001.

We are all at dire risk from the self- proclaimed incompetence of these monsters.

Disasterously Wrong

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This is a deeply depressing lesson in the particular mode of always-right mental illness — earlier today, Glenn Reynolds admiringly linked to himself regarding the overhyping of hurricanes:

HURRICANE HYPE: I’m watching some woman from Fox trying to make a big deal out of 30 mph winds on Lake Pontchartrain. Jeez.

One month later, with Lake Pontchartrain threatening to submurge all of New Orleans, this kind of smug eye-rolling is fully revealed as the perverse backwardness of a serial killer in clown make-up. Becasue part of the reason for all this “hurricane hype” was the fact that the unfolding disaster we’re now facing has been explicitly predicted for many many years. There seems to be a running theme…

Climate disasters? Tut tut!
Oil crisis? Pish posh!
Bloody insurgency? Fiddle faddle!

There’s stubborn. Then there’s stupid. But beyond these there is a category that must simply be described as sick.

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Blinded by the gloating immensity of their own bloggy asshole.

Drug-maddened sub-humans dance in around in costumes cleverly constructed from their own feces

Freak Show

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You thought the “MSM” was too focused on the bloody realities of war? Not so fast! Gaze in wonder as Powerline’s hindrocket savors the magic of opposite day:

almost every major newspaper in America is committed to the proposition that we aren’t really in a war, so they aren’t interested

You thought violent right-wing extremists would only use the ashes of the WTC as hallowed ground? Gaze in awe-struck befuddlement as Ann Coulter drenches the graves of New York firefighters with a stream of her rancid urine:

it’s far preferable to fight them in the streets of Baghdad than in the streets of New York, where the residents would immediately surrender. That strategy appears to be working. Then again, maybe it’s just that it’s so damnably hard to find parking in New York…

Even extremist cleric Pat Robertson is losing the battle against himself in the wake of his bewitching hymnal, “Onward Christian Death Squads.”

Times are tough in Cognitive Dissonance Land. Multimillionaire propagandists suddenly find themselves sputtering like mis-programmed robots, “white crosses bad, white crosses good, good bad! bad good!” while sparks fly out the back of their heads and smoke pours out their ears.

Yes, it is satisfying in it’s own way. But when violent robots get caught in their own bad programming, things can get ugly. Stuck in gunslinger showdown mode, the lunatic automatons just keep firing away…

How many of us will they take down before they return to their true calling? Namely, schizophrenically yammering at telephone poles on street corners, finger-thrusting angrily at vapor.

Also, just so we’re clear, Little Green Footballs:

Search results for conditions victory iraq (0 matches)

April Fools

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Daniel Drenzer, April 11, 2003::

Given that the war will likely be completely over in 60 days (the upper limit of Nordhaus’ “best-case” scenario); the northern and southern oil fields were captured without significant damage [UPDATE: the last oil fire has now been extinguished]; oil markets have been unruffled; and none of the worst-case scenarios have come to pass, it would be safe to say that the dice came up favorably. However, both press reports and antiwar activists played up the potential trillions in economic costs.

Glenn Reynolds, April 11, 2003:

“FOR SUCH AN ADVANCED SPECIES, THEY SURE KNOW HOW TO RUB IT IN.” — Marge Simpson

Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen’s cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn’t rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a “quagmire” were wrong — again! — how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong — again! — how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error — again — and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about “civilian casualties” now seem almost disappointed that there weren’t more — again — and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American “liberators” were proven wrong — again — as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn’t stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It’s probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.

Nah.

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Victor Davis Hanson, April 4, 2003:

Depressed and discredited pundits now turn to dire predictions of years of turmoil in postbellum Iraq…

Despite the protestations of a return to normalcy, this present war will ever so slowly, yet markedly nonetheless, change America’s relationships in a way unseen in the last 30 years…

In the neighborhood of the battlefield, Iran is in a unique position. The illegitimate government will have to tell its own restless population why the liberation of Iraq next door is a bad thing…

The world is upside down and we should expect some strange scenes of scrambling in the weeks ahead as side-glancing diplomats and nail-biting envoys flock to meet Mr. Powell in Washington, who — far from fearing those recent idiotic calls for his resignation — will in fact emerge as one of the most effective and powerful secretaries in recent history. Such are the ironies of war.

It will all be an interesting show.