Well This is an Interesting Development...

A conservative commentator on my friend's political blog seems to have followed me home from the comments fields; he's spent about 45 minutes reading my weblog today. So hi dave! Welcome! I hear you're from this neck of the woods, too--Drinking Liberally's on Thursdays at Union Jack's, if you'd like to come. :]

It's been interesting to me to watch Rubber Hose develop, actually; I was his second reader, I think, and since I lived with "Noz" in college I've engaged in lively debates with him on everything from capital punishment to religion to what we should make for dinner and whether we can watch "Hey Dude" and make tacos at the same time without a decline in quality of either activity. (actually, I don't think we debate that, we just did it. Watching "Hey Dude" with Noz was one of the peaks of hilarity my senior year--that show was just so totally awful it defied description. so of course we watched it every week.) So now I get to see people from all walks of life debating my former housemate, who's now a lawyer and even better at arguing than he was in college--and you really have to have known him to appreciate how good he was at it even then. His blog is always an interesting read, and he's attracted not only a number of regular readers who agree with him, but his own small cadre of people who don't! Right now a raging debate has emerged on the topics of "was it dumb for President Bush to say publically that no one had anticipated the levees at New Orleans might break, even though hurricaine experts have been saying it for years and the entire national media had been saying it since Friday afternoon last week?" and "what has the department of homeland security been doing all this time if not preparing for devastating metropolitan disasters like this one?" Horrifyingly enough, an article in today's paper makes it fairly clear that recent restrucuring at FEMA had a substantial impact on what's now being called a "not acceptable" response plan in New Orleans. They ran a seamless hurricaine simulation drill over a year ago that worked perfectly; now they couldn't even get the National Guard into the city in an efficient manner. This all seems pretty undeniable, whether you blame the Bush administration from the top down, or just the guys at the DHS, things could have been handled better, and people are dying because they weren't.

I still can't quite wrap my brain around the total destruction we've witnessed this week. It's like the tsunami--only I hadn't been to any of the places that were devastated then, so it was an abstract kind of horror. It's like 9/11--only so much worse. And unlike 9/11, there's no one to be angry at, nothing to curse, no one to say "we'll show those bastards!" to. Just water and mud, sewage and corpses. It's beyond imagining.

At any rate--it takes all kinds to make the world go round, so please don't come to my house and rip the Republicans for Kerry sticker off my car, dave. I'm treasuring it as a collector's item... And if you haven't already, everybody, please consider going and donating to the Red Cross relief effort online.