What the Hell, I Can Be As Giddy As Anyone

Right. I tempered it yesterday (and will do so today, with a thought-provoking link) by noting that there is some small truth to the notion that energy should be directed to helping the victims of our country's great natural disaster (the Gulf Coast, smartass, not the last two presidential elections), rather than to taking heads. After all, the need for help is immediate, and we can take heads later. As my friend Sasha says, "Can we put that on our calendars, please?"

But the devotion of the right wing to turning this affair into an amped-up call for civil war on the disadvantaged is beyond control. Items to check out:

-Sidney Blumenthal, whom I generally think is a pompous, self-absorbed prat, catalogs failings and outrages in a Salon column here, focusing on the disaster and its aftermath as yet more condemnation of the right wing's dedication to no government save that which makes the rich richer and further stratifies our society and culture. Sidney's got his facts straight, which is sort of surprising considering that none of them involve him personally sucking on the body parts of former Presidents.

-Jack Shafer, whom I generally think is an unnecessarily sharp-tongued crapweasel (tempered by his tendency to be not horribly wrong) who should've stuck with My Local Alternative Weekly (rather than advancing his career--I mean, c'mon, who's Jack supposed to be serving here, him or me?), writes a very compelling argument on why New Orleans might should not be rebuilt here, in Slate. The gist, which is not horribly wrong, is that NoLa was a dysfunctional city built on swamp and fill in an area known to be flood-prone and geographically disadvantaged in the extreme. Also in Slate, Steve Landesburg provides a more traditionally economics-based argument against "too much" disaster assistance, here. I have trouble getting behind this one, but offer it up out of my dutiful sense that no information is too much for my gentle readers.

-From Salon, via Atrios: A bunch of firefighters arrived in Atlanta to help out with rescue operations on the Gulf Coast, but have been both detained there and essentially ordered to help out as FEMA toadies. Some of them removed their FEMA t-shirts in protest. FEMA spokesperson Mary Hudak: "I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country."

Wow. Others have put it much more nicely, so I'll just get to the root: Fuck you, Mary Hudak, you fascist, agitprop-addicted smear artist. And get the fuck out of my country's government, after shutting your hideously stupid, disrespectful, ill-informed, treasonous, divisive pie hole.

Then die.

-It could be worse. I could send you over to get Malkinized. But I won't.

Okay, we're outraged enough now, right? Pour me a fucking Glenlivet, this blogging shit is real work.