Text 12079, 62 rader
Skriven 2007-02-11 20:27:10 av Rob Perkins (15520.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: Cath0licism and Creati=nism
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> Katrina was grotesque, the most spectacular demonstration of
> incompetence I've ever seen from the Federal Government.

Oh, I quite agree. Systemic indifferent incompetence.

Spanning 30-40 years across 15-20 Congresses and four or five Presidents of
both parties, of course.
 
> The failed attempt of some spinmeisters to deflect attention from the
> Administration's failure by pointing to the failures, real or
> imagined, of state and local official is grotesque, a sad indication
> of the depths to which our public discourse has descended.

Well, they failed, too. Miserably and completely, with competing local
governances actually getting in the way of amateur attempts to coalesce and
civilize. Utility corporations neglecting their implicit duty to restore
things like cell phone service to the trapped citizens.

The whole story impugns government at every level, and leaves no authority
there blameless. From Bush's foreign adventurism reducing NatGuard troop
levels, to the underestimation for *decades* of the impact of a cat 3
hurricane on the levy system, to the woefully ineffective State government,
more interested within the bureaucracy in CYA and blame-casting than almost
anything else, to the inattention all those Congresses and Presidents gave
to warnings by the Army Corps of Engineers, combined with lack of
improvement funding and the miles of red tape required to do anything really
meaningful, to Ray Nagin's weird vacillating and grandstanding. Not to
mention the behavior of police in the non-flooded areas, preventing people
from walking out of the disaster area...

...all of that together contributed to the NOLA coma.

Did I miss anything?

> The entire situation in Washington is grotesque.

Yeah. Even so, compared to Darfur, or Somalia, the Russian Duma, and maybe
even the Japanese Diet, the situation in Washington is so far from grotesque
as to be a patent joke to call it grotesque. It's got its massive troubles
but the plain truth is that it's also got much, much farther to fall before
it's really bad. 

> And everyone -- the
> the 34,000 civilians who died last year in Iraq, the 40,000 uninsured
> who died last year in the United States, the country, the planet -- is
> paying the price.

Raw number claims like this, without
supporting material, can't tell the entire story. For example, how many
civilians died in 2001 in Iraq? (Or, pick a year. Or average out five). Was
the cost of that allegedly (much?) lower number worth it? And of the
uninsured in the U.S., how many of those would have died regardless of their
status under insurance?
 
> I just don't see how I can put a smiling face on that.

Well, you can't, but I'd not consider it at all the worst of all possible
worlds. 

Rob, still hoping for peace in Iraq, somehow
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