Today is the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans in 2005 and exposed the United States’ shocking inability to look after its own citizens — who in New Orleans were mostly black and frequently poor. The U.S. president, also black (but not poor), was in that city today to mark the anniversary. Read more here. (Washington Post)
The lesson from Katrina is obvious to anyone who isn’t an idiot: it is critical governments be ready to jump in when there’s a crisis, whether natural disaster or economic. In New Orleans, government failure was apocalyptic.
And yet just yesterday, a couple of sociopath demagogues, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, hauled their lily-white posteriors to the spot where a black civil rights activist once gave the greatest speech in U.S. history. And they told a mob of white not-millionaires that they don’t need government to look after them. They just need God.
All on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s legendary speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Standing on the same steps. Before a virtually all-white crowd.
It’s beyond disgusting. And it’s not just an insult to the legacy of the great MLK. It’s a slap in the face of anyone who suffered during hurricane Katrina.
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are political supervillains. They’re a pair of pro-oil-drilling, anti-health care, pro-gun, anti-choice, pro-Christian, anti-gay, pro-wealthy, anti-science, anti-immigrant creeps, who are literally on the side opposing reason on every major issue their country is facing. They twist facts, using words like ‘socialism’ to panic regular Americans, who don’t even understand the word. The only reason they have a movement to lead is because the country is in economic collapse (thanks to decades of tax cuts to the wealthy combined with skyrocketing military spending) which has panicked a lot of gullible middle-class Americans.
And there’s a black president in the White House, which has really freaked out the racists.
And the worse it gets, the more support they get.
On the day before Katrina’s solemn anniversary, these unbelievable bastards were in Washington telling a mob of frightened, alienated xenophobes that they need God, not government. They called their event Restoring Honor. Which presumably starts with electing a pack of Republicans in the November election.
Republicans being the political party that rushed to expensive, pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, brought in tax cuts for the wealthy and basically bankrupted the country.
And the party whose president was in power on the day America failed New Orleans.
Maybe it makes sense to call their slimy, stealth-partisan gathering “Restoring Honor” after all.
The Republican Party has none left.
