Olbermann Puts the Biscuit in the Basket re: Katrina

The title is a lame throwback to his sportscasting days, but his commentary on last night's Countdown is one of the more eloquent pieces I've seen/read on the slow fed response to Hurrican Katrina. My favorite sentence from his op-ed: "[The federal government] has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water."

Louisiana, Louisiana, They're Trying to Wash Us Away

It was a little over two years ago that G and I spent a week in New Orleans. As you can read from my entry back then, NOLA fully deserved its rep as a sybaritic Utopia. But it was also a city that lived by a sharp dichotomy. Southern gentry in one world, tremendous poverty in the other. Taking a cab at night to catch Kermit Ruffins at Vaughan's Lounge in the Bywater, though uneventful, was enough to get my white chickenshit heart palpitating - as soon as we left the Vieux Carré, it was nothing but narrow and poorly-lit streets and run-down houses. When we got to the bar and realized the door was locked and we had to get buzzed in, it was a mortal certainty that we were on the wrong side of the tracks. But once Kermit played, people of all stripes packed the joint and shook their asses. That was New Orleans in a nutshell - you could practice abandon, but not necessarily reckless abandon.

And now it's been unspeakably laid to waste. It's been almost a week since mandatory evacuations were ordered, four days since Katrina hit, and yet it's still a place where the reinforcements and provisions have yet to arrive. A National Guard soldier said after being in New Orleans and Iraq, he'd take the latter. I watched Keith Olbermann tonight and witnessed the desperation of the thousands at the Convention Center. This is a place where people were told to go, as a shelter of last resort. They were told that they'd be taken care of. And yet, no real help has arrived yet, and there are dead and dying people in the streets. It's not like FEMA and the rest of the fucking government didn't have the heads-up on the impending arrival of a Category 4 hurricane.

So it comes to this. While the Superdome and the Convention Center became scenes out of Soylent Green and Hotel Rwanda, the President took time out to strum a guitar and eat birthday cake with John McCain before finally giving up the last 2 days of his 35-day vacation to try to look serious. Then, when he gets down to bidness, he takes the time to tell an outright lie (or self-deluded obfuscation) about nobody anticipating a levee breach. The Vice President? Is he at some undisclosed location with the Tin Man looking for a new heart? Who knows? And the Secretary of State decided to help the cause by taking in Spamalot and blowing a mint on Ferragamo shoes. But hey, the Speaker of the House threw himself wholeheartedly into an immediate rebuilding effort, the size of which should rival the Marshall Plan... er, actually, fuck it, let NOLA sink into the Gulf.

I'm livid and horrified and despairing for the people who didn't have the means to leave when they had a chance, be they residents or unfortunate tourists (there but for the grace of God go any of us who've visited during hurricane season). There is no motherfucking excuse that things are as they are. The people who had little to begin with, and are now being left to suffer in the most abominable ways. This is how we treat the least fortunate of our citizens?