Nonpartisan
Sep. 6th, 2005 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI take back most of my disagreement with Reid Stott. Judging from the first part of his essay, when he says "nonpartisan" he still means it literally, instead of the usual modern meaning of "stop criticizing politician X", which has so corrupted the term that I have a hard time taking it at face value. I also have doubts about Ray Nagin's sainthood, and it's only if you see the whole thing as a zero-sum Republicans vs. Democrats game that picking on Nagin really exonerates Bush (it seems pretty negative-sum to me).
But it's really, really hard to be nonpartisan when criticizing the federal government if one party controls everything. You have to go looking for some Democrats to criticize somewhere else to get that nonpartisan glow. Maybe I can rent myself out as a token Democrat to criticize when you want to be nonpartisan and are absolutely at wit's end. If we lose a few more thousand people because of federal incompetence, I can go out and say something offensive on the teevee for a reasonable fee while waving around my motor-voter form from the RMV with the party check box on it.
But it's really, really hard to be nonpartisan when criticizing the federal government if one party controls everything. You have to go looking for some Democrats to criticize somewhere else to get that nonpartisan glow. Maybe I can rent myself out as a token Democrat to criticize when you want to be nonpartisan and are absolutely at wit's end. If we lose a few more thousand people because of federal incompetence, I can go out and say something offensive on the teevee for a reasonable fee while waving around my motor-voter form from the RMV with the party check box on it.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-07 09:07 am (UTC)This guy was saying that there have been confirmed (no doubt) accounts by NO police and some refugees that they witnessed armed, unmarked military units operating in New Orleans, before the federal response had really kicked into gear. This guy suspected they were there to secure sites of "national importance" and that the federal disaster response was deliberately delayed to give these ops-teams enough time to complete their secretive missions. Since this guy was concerned about various "virus labs" in the NO and Gulf Coast area, he suspected that securing those labs. At the same time, he's angry that there were "hundreds of troops" present and that instead of saving lives, they were "securing files."
I have logs if further proof of this insidious conspiracy is required. UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.