Cherry Picasso

One last time before he disappears behind the pay curtain, John Tierney shows us what a Libertarian assclown looks like.

Today's column, his third on Katrina, heaps praise on a private ambulance service and excoriates FEMA. I have no doubt that Acadian Ambulance service performed heroic acts, and believe that FEMA's response was criminally incompetent. But Tierney's "private enterprise good, government bad" moral isn't supported by the facts, so Tienney again minimizes those facts he doesn't like.

Tierney claims the only radio network that survived the hurricane was Acadian's private one. But he admits, later on, that both of the company's New Orleans radio antennae were destroyed in the hurricane, and that Acadian was forced to use government equipment from a neighboring parish in order to communicate. (Presumably Tierney isn't such a libertarian lunatic that he opposes the role of local governments in public safety, but he is dishonest enough to downplay the use of public assets and the efforts of local officials to weave his fable of private supermen.)

Likewise, Tierney fails to acknowledge that federal government played a significant part in the creation of that satellite technology Acadian used, and ignores the rescue efforts of those evil bureaucrats in the Coast Guard. (I'll take a wild guess that Acadian's R&D investment in actual satellites was zero.)

Although Tierney may pretend otherwise, the dividing line between competence and incompetence in response to emergencies is not a private vs. public divide. The incompetence of FEMA and DHS was the consequence of Bush appointing political cronies and other Republican parasites to leadership positions. (And he's just repeated the same mistake, with Karl Rove, if we charitably call it a mistake.) The bureaucracy is only as incompetent as the Chimp in Charge.

Farewell and good riddance, Mr. Tierney.