Hurricane remembrance

With the 2006 Hurricane Season being well and truly under way, I wanted to look back at the thing that stands out in my mind as being the best commentary to come out of the huge debacle on the way the 2005 Hurricane season was mismanaged by the current administration.

Samantha Bee of The Daily Show on Comedy Central put her finger on it exactly when doing an "on the scene" wrap-up of storm-ravaged New Orleans and how the administration hoped to deal with the problem. (Once they actually realized that there, in fact, was a problem.) John Stewart, the host of the show, was asking about the administration's plan to have the Vice President lead the task force to determine what had gone wrong in the government's response to the impending disaster and the miserable failure of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to deal with the aftermath.

Stewart: Do you have any idea why Cheney was chosen in particular?

Bee: Yes, well, the government was eager to put a compassionate... [pauses, looks away]... a human... [pauses, grimaces]... a face on its relief effort. Now, y'know, I traveled with the vice president earlier as he met with storm victims, and I can tell you, beneath that seemingly crusty exterior lies an emotional black hole from which no glimmer of empathy can escape and into which the shattered remnants of the human experience are sucked to implode on themselves into a microscopic singularity of universal indifference.

'Course, that's just what I could see from behind the police tape, so... [shrugs]

The storm was a terrible thing and the response added insult to injury. My heart goes out to those people affected by it and I hope that they are getting their lives back in order.

I hope that wherever you are, you somethingthign to make you smile today.

Don Bergquist - 04 October 2006 - Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK