WTF

I've been reading a few news reports on the situation in NOLA, and I'm starting to feel a horrible combination of panic, furious rage, helplessness, and a healthy amount of WTF!?!

Over at Americablogthere are a couple of posts up about Health & Human Services and DOJ departments sending an e-mail out yesterday to push the Yay! War! March. I can understand everyone's fury over this, but I would be very surprised if the Director of HHS sat down yesterday and composed this e-mail and sent it out. I'm guessing that this e-mail was pre-scheduled to go out at the end of August, and in the wake of the NO crisis, no one stopped it. I am not going to get upset about this.

However, as I'm reading about suicides and rapes in the Superdome, and armed civilians surrounding police, and people shooting at aid workers - so much so that FEMA pulled out to protect their workers, I'm mostly left with WTF!?!

I'm actually feeling slightly worse than I did on 9/11. On 9/11, we had a crisis, and the people of New York responded with astonishing grace. Leaders emerged amongst the firemen and the cops and the people working in the WTC and people on the ground. If Bush hadn't been president, I think I would have felt better about my nation and my species than I ever had at any time in my life. (The fact that Bush was at the helm made me very concerned, and I think history has proven my concern to be well-founded.)

But here, I'm just feeling incredibly hopeless, and I'm not even in NOLA - I cannot even imagine the hell those people are going through.

I was reading TBOGG's post about Bush's speech, and how the Cornerites were displaying a lack of faith in their dear leader for a moment, but they seemed to be talking themselves out of it, hoping that as the water recedes, so to will the chaos and they can then pretend that George W. Bush, resolute leader, did everything right, everything a leader should do when there is a crisis. But we should not forget his detached, lackluster, inhuman response to this tragedy. And we should not forget the political decisions that were made by this administration and Congress that kneecapped the preparedness of this city, that essentially allowed this to happen.