Katrina and the Kos

About twelve hours ago I toyed with the idea of writing a satire in
which the Bush-haters blame W. for the magnitude of the disaster
bearing down on New Orleans. I discarded the idea on the grounds that
it’s (a) not funny, and (b) not believable enough. I mean, who could
really imagine that theory even from a barking moonbat?

Shows you what I know. One of the contributors at Daily Kos has already
flung those feces,
before Katrina lands, yet. And — here’s the funny part —
the charge is already falsified by the facts on the ground.

I’m not a fan of George W. Bush. But when his opponents are
this transcendently foaming-at-the-mouth idiotic, it’s hard not to
wind up supporting him.

19 comments

  1. Yeah… I’ve never actually directly opposed W, lord knows I don’t care for supporting him but hey he’s the best we’ve got.

    Now if I could only describe how sad that fact is.

  2. I linked to your post because of the last sentence, which I find myself in agreement with. The debate on my post that occurred in just a couple minutes of putting it up proves your point. Even the “reasonable” voices on the Left can’t see the problem.

  3. That’s not how I read it; I read it as “National guardsmen are now in Iraq and aren’t around to protect people from the hurricane” (perhaps by standing line abreast or something; I dunno). Real moonbattery would be something along the lines of “Bush’s nonsupport of Kyoto caused global warming and weirder weather, and caused this particular hurricane”.

  4. Tom Clancy has commented that he’s constrained to writing about events that are at least plausible, while reality has no such constraint. This is another case of that.

  5. Do you really want to start cherry-picking some comments off Free Republic or Little Green Footballs? ‘Cause I assure you, I can point out plenty of “Nuke Mecca!” and near-pornographic, salivating descriptions of tortures that the folks there want to inflict on “moo-slimes”.

    If you want to make the argument that the leading lights of the left blogs or the right blogs are twits, go ahead. But there are asshatted commenters and contributors everywhere.

  6. I’m not a fan of George W. Bush.
    Just his policies.
    But when his opponents are this transcendently foaming-at-the-mouth idiotic, it’s hard not to wind up supporting him.
    Thass right. One antibush dork saying something foolish on a blog somewhere ought to be enough to get ANYBODY standing foursquare behind the President. Al Quaida have said they’re not going to rest until we’ve all been circumcised with rusty tin can lids and forced to memorise the Quran, after all, which is a live and practical possibility in my book.
    Bush gets it. But do you?[/rhetorical]

  7. This is all conjectural–I hope someone who’s more familiar with what the National Guard does will add on.

    The National Guard could have helped with evacuation. I just read a piece by a man who helped get very sick old people off a
    bus–presumably more hands (including getting people on to buses) would have been good.

    The National Guard can help prevent looting and crime, and I believe they also do some cleaning up and rebuilding.

    Also, I’ve heard that people who volunteer for the National Guard are also likely to volunteer as firefighters and EMTs, so there’s a double whammy.

  8. Nathan, blaming injury and death in New Orleans on Bush because the NG is in Iraq seems pretty moonbattish, overall. Especially when there are shots on the evening news of the NG handing out food to people in the SuperDome.

  9. That’s quite true Nancy. AND the NG is in New Orleans right now (as well as Biloxi, Baton Rouge, etc.) doing those things. The point is that the knucklehead over at Kos actually was bashing Bush for something that is so easily proved untrue you can see it on the evening news.

    Grendel, we all know that both the left and the right has their share of twits, but there’s a difference between screaming “nuke Mecca” in comments on someone’s blog and posting, on the most widely read political blog in the world, something that is blatantly false.

  10. I suggest redacting the last sentence, since most of us would like to think you’re above a Guilt-by-Association logical fallacy.

  11. Grendel, we all know that both the left and the right has their share of twits, but there’s a difference between screaming “nuke Mecca” in comments on someone’s blog and posting, on the most widely read political blog in the world, something that is blatantly false.

    Uh, you do know that Daily Kos allows for user journals, just like Slashdot and kuro5hin do, right? You do know that you can sign up for free and post your own journals, right? I fail to see the bright and shining line between comments on LGF (which is hardly just “someone’s blog”), and diaries on Daily Kos. So, what is this difference that you speak of?

    But, hey, if you want something demonstrably, head-scratchingly weird, I can point to an LGF poster saying that Christians didn’t bathe in the middle ages because the water was filthy, and they were smarter than that, and it was the “Muzzies” who were fools for bathing. Err, except that the Jews were smart for washing their hands, which ended up saving many of them from the Black Death.

  12. So, Grendel, you are saying that a user diary on Kos is the equivalent to a comment on LGF? Hmmmmmm, interesting correlation there. In one case, it is a person visiting, like you or I. We have to assume that you and I don’t represent ESR’s views, we are simply commenting on those views. On the other hand, a user diary on Kos is someone who has been allowed there on a regular basis by Markos and the views espoused in that diary, at the least, are tolerated by him. There’s a significant different between what a twit says in the comments and what a twit says in the officially sanctioned diary. Or else why would Markos have made an effort to get rid of the twits last month? He clearly recognizes the issue even if you don’t want to. I have to suspect, though, that if LGF censored commenters, there would be yells about hypocrisy or some such. Hmmmmm, again.

    Oh yeah, the guy talking about why Christians didn’t bathe, there’s no accounting for wingnuts anymore than moonbats. I never said they weren’t twits.

  13. Eric: “allowed there on a regular basis by Markos”? The ability to post a diary on Daily Kos is a consequence of signing up for a free account and waiting a week. It is entirely automated. Markos himself does not have to come down from the mountain and bless the diarist. The diaries are in no sense “officially sanctioned” any differently than comments are.

    You do know that Charles has kicked and banned users before, right? And that while LGF does not have open registration, Daily Kos does? It’s a lot easier to maintain a user pool of one’s liking when the accounts are finite, and the users know they can be perm-banned at Charles’s will (they’re usually not, but it’s happened) with no ability to turn around and get another account?

    Comparing Daily Kos kicking problem users (who can turn right back around and register for another account) with LGF’s closed registration with occasional kicked users—it doesn’t seem particularly valid to me. You certainly can’t claim that Charles is less responsible for his commenters than Markos is for his diarists.

  14. I just checked the original link. It did not say that Katrina was all Bush’s fault. It mistakenly said that the National Guard wasn’t there to help because it was in Iraq, which is a much smaller claim.

    I expect that there would have been more National Guard available if there weren’t a war in Iraq.

  15. I think the left HAS gone off the deep end. Kennedy’s post on the huffington site is a good example. If only C02 was controlled by President Bush… that is moonbatery at it’s finest.

  16. I just read that a quarter of the Gulf States’ National Guard is in Iraq. It’s got to have made some difference, but I don’t have a feeling for how much.

  17. I guess if anyone brings up the fact that Bush cut the budget allocated for handling this kind of emergency (presumably to redirect the money towards funding the Iraq war), you’ll just go libertarian and say government shouldn’t be involved in providing this kind of sysadmin and relief anyway?

    It does seem, though, that the case against Bush on New Orleans *isn’t* well represented by that post you’re drawing attention to.

  18. Phil wrote: “I guess if anyone brings up the fact that Bush cut the budget allocated for handling this kind of emergency (presumably to redirect the money towards funding the Iraq war)”

    You do know that the Left and the MSM argued, vehemently, that money allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, etc. should be cut to increase Medicaid and Medicare funding, right?

  19. BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. (AP) — The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states’ initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.

    Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that ”arguably” a day or so of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard’s 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana’s 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.

    ”What you lost was a lot of local knowledge,” Taylor said, as well as equipment that could have been used in recovery operations.

    ”The best equipment went with them, for obvious reasons,” especially communications equipment, he added.

    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Katrina-National-Guard.html

    You do know that the Left and the MSM argued, vehemently, that money allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, etc. should be cut to increase Medicaid and Medicare funding, right?

    Nice sweeping generalization with no supporting information!

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