The Tierney of The Moronity

Watch as John Tierney once again tries to cram every conceivable facet of human existence into his tiny intellectual framework:

"Why is New Orleans in so much worse shape today than New York City was after the attacks on Sept. 11?

"The short answer is that New York was attacked by fire, not water."

And you thought New York City was attacked by terrorists.

Of course, if he wanted to address reality, the latest installment of Mr. T's bi-weekly exercise in intellectual onanism would have petered out before the third sentence.

If we took Tierney seriously -- and why should we start now -- then the country should have disbanded the military after 09/11/01 and let those interested in the protection of the Big Apple from fire form the Homeland Security Assurance Co. of New York, N.Y. Why should Montanans subsidize the protection of the big city fire-traps, since they've got nothing worth flying into? If New York Citian developers had to pony up for civil defense premiums, they'd stop building such gigantic targets. (And/or, as Tierney would have it, their insurance companies would pressure cities to enact stronger aircraft-resistant building codes -- apparently, it's bad for citizens to join together to demand government-enforced restrictions on property owners for the sake of public safety, but it's good for citizens to form corporations that demand government restrictions on property owners for the same purpose.)

The most bizarre aspect of the column is that Tierney didn't need to invoke 9/11 to make his dullwitted points; he just made himself look more foolish by trying to compare two entirely dissimilar tragedies.

Perhaps we should be grateful Tierney hasn't called upon his pale pal Steve Sailer to teach us the biological and anthropological lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

Yet.

A certain wingnut blogger -- who shall remain unlinked to by me -- watched the tragic events unfold in New Orleans and along the Gulf of Mexico this week and expressed disgust. Not disgust because of the suffering of the survivors or the deaths of the dead, but rather disgust at the fact that Bush tapped the disgraced and impeached President Clinton to assist in fundraising activities.

How much contempt for humanity does it take to obsess about the Nasty Man and His Vile Organ while human beings are needlessly suffering and dying?

Summary Judgment

What the hell is it with these wingnuts and their insatiable bloodlust? Death-crazed lunatic Mona Charen writes:

No doubt there were some desperate residents of New Orleans who took to theft simply to get food and water from stores bereft of clerks and electricity. But most of the looting is not of that character. As good people within the city struggle to help the sick who lack functioning hospitals, the thousands who lack basic food and shelter, and the unknown number still waiting to be rescued from flooded homes, the psychological blow looters are dealing to the city (and the country) is dramatic.

How does Charen know who's looting what? Answer: she doesn't. It seems logical that thousands of people who lack basic food would be looting simply to get food and water they can't get anywhere else. And how much more of a psychological blow would looting cause to people trying to survive without basic food and shelter? I'm sure the thought of summary executions gives Charen a warm feeling, but the idea of law enforcement separating the "good" and "bad" looters from shooting distance should give sane people pause.

A Vacant Lott

Trent Lott was one of the people who lost his home to Hurricane Katrina:

An oak tree may be all that is left of the home where Sen. Trent Lott raised his family and joined other political leaders for a rocking-chair view of the sea.

Lott, a Mississippi Republican, learned from neighbors and relatives that the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina, rising as high as 30 feet, leveled his Pascagoula home along the Gulf Coast near the Alabama border.

Of course, if you read all the way to the end of the article, you learn

Lott has a second house in Jackson, Miss.

So Lott's suffering isn't equal to that of most other affected Mississippians and, most fortunately, neither he nor any of his family was harmed. I'm sure his home was fully insured, and that whatever insurer he has will bend over backwards to provide good service to a rich and connected Republican. (That would go double if it's the federal flood insurance that's triggered.)

Someone less liberal than me might suggest some divine hand was at work. But I don't share Pat Robertson's theology.

Someone less tactful than me might suggest that Lott's house would have survived had he built it out of the same material as his toupee. But I wish the Senator well.

Another Victim

You've got to wonder if Howie the Putz Kurtz is embarrassed that the Washington Post left up this bit of snivelling during his month-long -- and running -- vacation in August:

Melting Down

Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 29, 2005; 9:00 AM

Note: Howard Kurtz is currently on vacation.

I had no electricity Wednesday night.

Neither, apparently, did 149,999 other people in the Washington area.

What happened to plunge the nation's capital into sweltering darkness? It rained.

This is a common summertime occurrence. Then some trees and branches fall and knock down the wires. And then you have no power.

Which, I can tell you, makes it difficult to blog.

And to sleep, after a 98-degree day.

The local utility, which does a lousy job of dealing with such matters -- thousands of homes may not get power back until tonight -- always promises to do better, but never does. Once a summer hurricane knocked out power to much of the area for a week. Terrorists couldn't pull that off in their dreams.

I hope the Red Cross has airlifted supplies to the Putz by now. And that the power company has been invaded and its leaders executed.

Judy Died For Our Sins

"When I'm not spending time in jail on behalf of the First Amendment, I live in lower Manhattan," [Judith Fucking-]Miller wrote. "I would very much like to have been at the opening of your show, but unfortunately, under the circumstances, that might not be possible."

By the way, this article has J. F.-M. using a computer in the prison library. You don't suppose her claim of writer's cramp from the burdens of longhand was as fact-free as her WMD reporting, do you?

Update: Jane Hamsher at firedoglake and TBogg already spotted this.

They assume we are dumb and poorly educated. That ignores the massive improvements that have been made since the Civil War ended. That's when a dual set of second-class citizens was created overnight -- destitute whites, including many in the former planter class, and uneducated former slaves.

You are dumb and poorly educated, Matt. Before the Civil War, the South had a rather large set of second-class non-citizens. It was the basis of the Southern economy. And those destitute "planters" you whine about were slaveholders, whose only valuable capital was the humans they owned. They were lucky to be living after the Civil War, let alone granted citizenship.

There wasn't a Southern utopia, intellectual or otherwise, before "the end of the Civil War," no matter how much you imagine yourself in the role of slave owner.

By the way, Matt, when you identify casino gambling as an economic foundation of the South, you aren't making a convincing case for either the economic significance of the South or its role in the growth of America.

I'm not here to bash the South (or any other region). I'm only here to bash those whose vision of Southern greatness excludes -- beyond lip service -- a significant portion of the South's population. Those whose version of Southern heritage is nothing more than a whitewashed fantasy land.

Miserable Failure

"Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported."

Sorry, NYT, but you're shite out of luck. The war president before which you prostrated yourself doesn't care. It's hard work, and he's tuckered out from his five-week vacation. He'll do what he needs to do to protect his war, his tax cuts and his corporate masters, and no more.

Oh, and he may include looters in his growing list of terrorists. Otherwise, don't hold your breath.

Listen to the Neo-Confederates at The Corner wail about a supposed tragedy:

HISTORY LOST [Jim Robbins]

Katrina destroyed Confederate President Jefferson Davis' final home Beavoir. It was also the site of the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library. This is a significant loss to history.

Yeah, a real tragedy. Like the destruction of one of Saddam's palaces or Mussolini's summer home.

I'm more saddened by the collapse of an Office Depot than the thrashing of a shrine to the leader of a terrorist nation who was complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans - and even more southerners. Too bad Jeffy Dave wasn't alive when it happened.

Free Enterprise Fraud

More lying right-wingers:

A PR firm the fund retained, Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, sent out a pitch this month to reporters saying Factor "just replaced Stephen Moore as the president of Free Enterprise Fund. Big shoes to fill! But did you know he is the heir to the Max Factor Makeup fortune? And now he runs one of the must influential policy groups in DC!"

Quite a story line: eyeliner to advocacy, rouge to riches. Except it's apparently not true. When asked about his ties to Max Factor, Mallory Factor said he knew of no link. He said it's possible "someone in the family way back" was related, but he's no heir. "I grew up in low-income housing in Bridgeport, Connecticut," Factor said. He blamed the PR firm for the bad information. The PR firm blamed Factor's "handlers."

Wow. These guys are such losers you'd think they were rightwing bloggers.

Oh wait, they are.

Democracy requires freedom of the press. Judith Miller was jailed, not for anything she wrote, but for something she knew but refused to divulge.

The freedom to maintain silence - except with respect to a crime, and even then, if the information would incriminate the speaker - is essential to every one of us, and if we allow that freedom to be denied to one, it can be denied to all.

Marilyn E. Williams
Ithaca, N.Y., Aug. 29, 2005

I hate to break it to you, Ms. Williams, but the freedom to maintain silence except for self-incrimination is denied to all, equally. So how essential is it, if you didn't even know this?

The Death of Reaganomics

On Schmuck Central Station, Jimmy "Astroturf" Glassman pens an appreciation of Jude Wanniski, who died of a heart attack on Monday.

Seems Jimmy prefers Jude's earlier wacko ideas (Reaganomics) to his more recent ones (opposition to the War Against Iraq). Jimmy rather coldly suggests that Jude went the way of St. Ronnie once he became eligible to receive Social Security: "Wanniski, a disciple of the Columbia University economist Robert Mundell, who won a Nobel Prize in 1999, valued history and -- at least until the final years -- logical clarity."

Jimmy also describes Wanniski's more recent writings as "sadly loopy," but undercuts that claim by referencing an Wanniski article castigating Bill Kristol for his war cheerleading. If that's an example of loopy, Jimmy should be so sane.

It's a shame Wanniski didn't live to see the Dow reach 36,000.

Land of Genuises

You might have seen the story about an Illinois student newspaper which published a series of articles about an eight-year-old orphan girl whose father served and died in the War Against Iraq. The story turned out to be a hoax; the question remains as to whether the paper's editor was in on the scam.

The larger story -- not the fake one -- is chock full o' morons. Here's the editor's tale:

He [Michael Brennan] was the student newspaper editor when some of the Kodee "Kenningsology" columns were published but was quick to point out in the Friday interview that other Daily Egyptian editors had also published the columns.

He said he spent "1,000 hours" talking on the telephone with a person he said he believed was Kodee. He now believes it was Colleen Hastings, a person identified by the Daily Egyptian in its Friday edition as Jaimie Reynolds, a 27-year-old from Marion who graduated in 2004 from the SIUC School of Radio and Television. In the edition, the student newspaper published a front-page apology under the headline, "To all, we deeply regret our error."

What kind of freaking idiot spends a total of 42 days on the phone with a 27-year-old woman and thinks he's talking with an eight-year-old girl? For that matter, what kind of freak spends 42 days on the phone with an eight-year-old child he's not related to?

Brenner's clearly a half-wit; the only question is whether he's a half-wit for thinking anyone would buy that story.

And then there's the chuckleheads who allowed their ten-year-old daughter to be passed off as someone else's child:

On Thursday, 10-year-old Caitlin Hadley sat between her parents on a couch in her mom's office, retelling the two-year odyssey that began with her belief that she was going to be the star of a documentary film about a little girl named Kodee.

"It was sort of weird, but I had a lot of fun," Caitie said.

Her father, Richard Hadley, is a pastor at a Nazarene church in Montpelier, Ind., and her mother works for the church's regional office. Both said they felt they'd been scammed by Reynolds.

"I just realized that I didn't know this girl," Tawnya Hadley said. "In the profession that my husband is in, we move and meet new people all the time. What if she'd never brought Caitie back? We feel like we're idiots."

...

As Caitie's involvement continued, the Hadleys began asking why the documentary had not been finished.

A documentary film about a little girl named Kodee.

We feel like you're idiots too, Tawnya.

Remind me never to get pastoral counselling from a Nazarene pastor.

Katrina and the Waves

Hurricane Katrina could bring 15 inches of rain and a storm surge of 20 feet or higher that would "most likely topple" the network of levees and canals that normally protect the bowl-shaped city from flooding.

Update: I'm not sure this post has/had a point. It also comes off as insensitive. My only excuse is that I'm just tired right now.