Anger Anthology

Words are failing me right now. So here are the much better words of much better writers, and the much better thoughts of much better thinkers. -- Grace


New--From Driftglass: Hellbrew

One of our Great Cities is mortally wounded and spiraling into something out of Mad Max due to a hellbrew of bad luck, bad weather and outright criminal incompetence coming from a federal government in which every muscle except those used for spinning, lying and covering-up has obviously atrophied into tapioca pudding.

From the head of that government we expect and deserve clarity, wisdom and comfort.

Instead we get stale, half-eaten phrases from the bottom of Karl Rove’s high school lunchbox, stitched together with a shaky and careless hand and delivered with eye-rolling boredom or jawdroppingly inappropriate smirks and giggles...by a grumpy lout obviously pissed that calamity had eaten in to his vacation days.
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From The St. Petersburg Times: Singer Patti Smith slams George Bush

U.S. singer and musician Patti Smith attacked business and President George W. Bush at a press event in St. Petersburg on Thursday, where she received an excited response from the local journalists and fans.

“The world right now is really f***ed up,” she said addressing the 100-strong crowd that gathered at the “505” record shop on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa.

“The world right now is being run by a**holes like George Bush and pharmaceutical companies, these greedy people who don’t care about the environment, who don’t really understand the poor, who don’t understand other cultures. We are the underground and we have to get strong, because the world is being run by business.”
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From Commenter Mike V: President McKinley would be doing a faster job (via Americablog)

We keep hearing from the Bush Administration how "help is on the way." In fact, I just finished watching GWB's interview with Diane Sawyer (over at Crooks & Liars). When Diane asked about why was it taking so long for supplies, etc., Bush smirked (of course) and said things take time ... which got me thinking:

What manner of 19th-century transportation is the government employing, anyway? Mules, steamboat, "iron horse"? And I realized I have a copy of the 1899 edition of Baedeker's (like Frommer's) New York, which describes how long it takes to get to other U.S. cities from NYC.

Using 1899 methods (rail), aid sent from NYC to New Orleans would have arrived in less than 4 days! By mid-day Sunday last, it was all over the media that New Orleans was going to get hit by a Category 5 hurricane on Monday morning. If aid were sent out on Sunday, President McKinley could've gotten it to New Orleans from any city in the U.S. by now.

So explain to me again, why it's taking so long ...
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From CJR Daily: By Omission, Not Commission

NBC photojournalist Tony Zumbado looked visibly shaken this afternoon when he spoke on MSNBC with Alison Stewart. It's no wonder. He had just filmed the chaos at the New Orleans convention center where hundreds of people had been, by his account, dumped and abandoned over the past four days.

Babies were becoming dehydrated and dying. Old people in wheelchairs were wasting away. The sick were not getting their treatments. Neither the police nor the National Guard nor clean water nor food was anywhere to be found. The only vaguely official personage who had come to visit these forlorn, and now angry, people was Harry Connick Jr.
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From The Rude Pundit: The Empty Vessel as President

Nah. Fuck him. When [Bush] told Diane Sawyer that "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees," someone should have taken him, flown him to New Orleans, put him in a tiny pirogue somewhere off Claiborne Avenue, and sent him merrily on his way.

[Anyone else find Bush's comment eerily reminiscent of Rice's 9/11 statement that no one could have imagined terrorists flying jets into buildings? This is a very unimaginative administration -- excluding their fevered delusions about WMDs.]
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From a really pissed off Jack Cafferty on CNN (via Crooks and Liars)

JACK CAFFERTY: I'm 62 and I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earth Quake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people. Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people that are in that Super Dome down there...This is Thursday...This storm happened five days ago. It's a disgrace and don't think the world isn't watching...
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From James Wolcott: New Orleans Died for Bush's Sins

No, this is the time for politics, none better, because I can tell you just from being out of NY a few days that a lot of people in this country are shocked and sobered by New Orleans, but they're also worried and pissed off. They're making the connection between the money, manpower, and resources expended in Iraq and how raggedy-ass the rescue effort has been in the Gulf. If you don't say it now when people's nerves are raw and they're paying full attention, it'll be too late once the waters receded and the media-emoting "healing process" begins.
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From Counterpunch via Left I on the News

As culpable, criminal and loathsome as the Bush Administration is, it is only the apotheosis of an overarching trend in American society that has been gathering force for decades: the destruction of the idea of a common good, a public sector whose benefits and responsibilities are shared by all, and directed by the consent of the governed.

For more than 30 years, the corporate Right has waged a relentless and highly focused campaign against the common good, seeking to atomize individuals into isolated 'consumer units' whose political energies kept deliberately underinformed by the ubiquitous corporate media can be diverted into emotionalized 'hot button' issues (gay marriage, school prayer, intelligent design, flag burning, welfare queens, drugs, porn, abortion, teen sex, commie subversion, terrorist threats, etc., etc.) that never threaten Big Money's bottom line.
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