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Emack and Bolio’s has a flyer in their shop that invites lactards to attempt their hard yogurt. As it contains live cultures, they claimed, many lactose intolerant people can eat it without ill effect. For the record, with regard to my own reaction to the yogurt, it was very, very not good. So much for that.

Thanks to everyone for being good sports about my last post, especially Colleen. I’m being serious; your reactions were appropriate and well-stated. I knew I’d get some pulses up. My intention was to get a discussion started, and there’s nothing quite like inflammatory remarks for that job. One well-taken objection was related to the timing of my comments. People are still dying and I’m already speaking about the incident like it was an idiotic error instead of a massive disaster. Like it was history instead of people. This is a fair criticism.

When you are training a dog, you are supposed to reprimand them only if you catch them misbehaving red-handed. If the dog crapped on the carpet, and you only discover this hours later, hitting them or yelling serves no purpose. The dog can’t make the connection. People are the same. Bush placed counterterrorism as a low priority when he first took office, despite repeated warnings. Terrorists attacked on 9/11 and thousands died. Months later, when the 9/11 Commission released their report indicating how badly prepared we were, people said, “Oh.” And then they re-elected Bush. Now we have Katrina, and there will eventually be a bipartisan independent investigation that will conclude that our government once again failed spectacularly. It will come too late for anyone to learn anything. People have the memory of dogs.

After the Holocaust, we said, “Never again.” There is a genocide happening, right now, in the Sudan, but we’re too busy fighting the enemy-of-the-day in Iraq. People forgot. After Vietnam, we said, “Hey, guerrilla warfare on someone else’s land without the support of the indigenous people is impossible, even for a superpower.” Now, we’re fighting an urban guerrilla war in Iraq, against the indigenous people. People forgot. There was flagrant abuse of human rights in the Abu Gharib prison on Bush’s watch, in response to which he punished some low-level grunts. Now blame for Katrina’s high death toll is falling on the director of FEMA, when it once again belongs much higher up. People are forgetting that this is not the first time Bush has led incompetently and failed to keep our homeland secure.

Bush created the situation in the Gulf Coast that has led to so much death. By shipping out National Guard troops, by consequently shipping out thousands of emergency services personnel, by cutting funding for the levees, by directing all of our resources toward fighting terrorism when that was never the biggest threat to homeland security. So now, before New Orleans is dry again, is the time to reprimand the Bush administration and everyone who failed to recognize how obvious this disaster was. Now is the time to say, “Bad dog. Very, very bad.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.