A Poverty of Thought
A Poverty of Thought: "Tuesday, September 13, 2005; Page A27
It took exactly one month -- until the president's prime-time news conference of Oct. 11, 2001 -- to refute the notion that Sept. 11 'changed everything.' When a reporter said, 'You haven't called for any sacrifices from the American people,' he replied, 'Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before.' And that was before the sacrificing became really hellacious with the requirement that passengers remove their shoes at security checkpoints.
The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters -- thinking -- perished even more quickly, at about the time Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed beach house. 'Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost,' she said in a speech on the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears. You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed. Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee."
It took exactly one month -- until the president's prime-time news conference of Oct. 11, 2001 -- to refute the notion that Sept. 11 'changed everything.' When a reporter said, 'You haven't called for any sacrifices from the American people,' he replied, 'Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before.' And that was before the sacrificing became really hellacious with the requirement that passengers remove their shoes at security checkpoints.
The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters -- thinking -- perished even more quickly, at about the time Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed beach house. 'Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost,' she said in a speech on the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears. You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed. Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee."
posted by Blackgold at 5:26 PM
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