Ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

It’s hard work. It’s hard work to write about anything other than the tragedy of Katrina, even though the criminals who stole America are still hard at work, looting the treasury and pillaging the Constitution and corrupting our institutions. It’s hard to keep from hoping that perhaps, at long last we might have our press corps back again, as Bill Maher said last night to Anderson Cooper; that a few members of the press might begin to demand answers, expose lies and turn over rocks.

It’s hard not to hope that the growing obviousness of Bush’s lies, the growing obviousness of his incompetence and the incompetence of the political buddies he puts in control of our most important assets will not, at long last wake up a public from its hypnotic trance and cause the nation to throw out the looters that have made our country look so much like a diseased and mortally wounded animal, thrashing around in its own blood and filth.

“I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," Said Bush to Diane Sawyer. Nobody except those who live there and nobody except those in charge of keeping from happening who were fired or laid off so that we could afford to give massive amounts of money to Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Exxon and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Nobody but everbody. Maureen Dowd spells it all out far better than I can in her column today.

But George Walker Bush, unlike some untold thousands on the Gulf Coast, is a survivor. George Walker Bush is a man who can appear at the rescue of nine miners at Quecreek Pennsylvania as though he had not just cut the Mine Safety and Health Administration budget, or packed Mine Safety agencies with executive hacks from mining companies with the very worst safety records. George is a man who can do this with a smile and a condescending smirk and get people to think he’s a hero. As usual, he bet on the ignorance and short memory of the American People and as usual he won the bet.

The smirk is beginning to look more like a grimace of rage, the chuckle more simian and the desperation more obvious, but who can tell? He may get away with it again. I had an argument yesterday with a local chap; replying to my assertion that Bush had exacerbated this calamity by forcing the Army Corps of Engineers to stop work, he replied that Clinton should have finished the job while there was still money.

There is no more powerful force in human affairs than stupidity.