And Jay (Tea), I actually remember Bush hollering about the WMDs, but that’s because, unlike you, I wasn’t born yesterday.

We have had a couple of power blinks, but no sustained outages. (Though my mom reports she lost cable.) We’ve had sustained rain and Chicago-sized gusts since about 8am, but so far it’s been comparable to the Rita experience and nowhere near Katrina/Andrew level intensity.

J.

Yes, that’s true, they just get asked for their opinion on almost every major media outlet and have thousands of people who come to see them speak.

PT barnum was right.

And while I was partly referring to Ray Nagin, let’s not let Aaron Broussard off the hook. That man is sheer and utter scum.

For those who don’t recognize the name, remember the man crying on TV about his employee’s mother in the nursing home who called day after day, begging for help and being promised rescue, until she drowned days after the storm? Complete bullshit. The nursing home residents died on Monday after the owners abandoned them, and the owners were charged with their deaths (but acquitted).

Broussard also ordered the city’s pump workers to leave their stations when the water started rising, contributing mightily to the flooding of New Orleans — and many of those pump operators didn’t want to leave.

He’s still in office down there, having survived a recall petition.

J.

Correct. It was Jerry Falwell who blamed teh gays.

I’m sure CSS feels the same way about this as you cats feel about Revs. Falwell and Hagee, Pat Robertson… you know, the guys that think God actually punishes cities with storms (and terrorist attacks) and don’t just joke about it, the utterly thoughtless ‘jokes’ of your presidential candidate, etc.

My point is that he’s just one guy, indicative of nothing, and people laugh at all kinds of strange things. One can’t draw any conclusion from this other than that the former chairman made a tasteless joke.

Seems more likely to me that everybody has learned from the ‘05 debacle, from Mayor Nagin to Gov. Jindal right up the chain. It’s not as if the mayor’s been inept this time around – ordering mandatory evacuations and whatnot.

Oh, I think they’re very disputable.

And then, to cover my ass, I went back and changed the text of the Authorization for Use of Military Force In Iraq, passed by Congress.

And I changed the text of Bush’s speeches on Iraq.

I am so ashamed that I was so easily exposed in my careful excision of the 9/11 references in those documents.

Good god, people, are you so mindwiped by the “Bush lied” chants that you have lost the ability to double-check things for yourself? The text of the AUMF is all over the place, and NOWHERE is there a mention of 9/11. Bush is on record — NUMEROUS TIMES — saying that there is no evidence tying Iraq to 9/11. Yes, ties to Al Qaeda, and those are indisputable, but NOT to 9/11.

And this has exactly what to do with Hurricane Gustav, anyway?

Oh, yeah, Strowbridge, eager to make sure people didn’t pay attention to a former DNC chairman joking about how Gustav hitting during the RNC shows that God was on his side.

It’s been fascinating to see how things are different, with the same inept Democrats running New Orleans but an actual, competent governor in Baton Rouge. Jindal is doing all the things that Blanco should have.

J.

Would’ve made as much sense as invading Iraq.

Wow, you wrote that with a straight face. Kudos, seriously.

The invasion of Iraq was indirectly tied to 9/11, only in the sense of “this guy’s violated too many terms of his 1991 surrender, poses a threat to his neighbors and the region, and needs to be taken out.” The side benefit of that was giving us a sizable military presence in the region AND a chance to take on militant Muslims with our military.

And, if it succeeds (like it seems to be now, but it’s still up in the air), we will have helped create a free, largely-democratic Arab Muslim nation right smack dab in the middle of the Islamic world — a hell of a scare to the theocrats, kleptocrats, thugs, monarchs, and other assorted tyrants and dictators that seem to run nearly any Muslim nation.

That’s the kind of thing that is the best long-term weapon against militant Islam — the kind of thing that led to 9/11, along with all those other terrorist attacks before then that went largely unanswered.

J.

As I recall it, the right blamed Iraq.

At this point in Katrina, we had already lost power, but we’ve still got it for now. And the worst part is, only 2 channels are showing this in HD.