This is the story of the Hurricane,
A man the authorities came to blame…

It’s not the Bush family’s fault.  Not really.  It was Ron Reagan (Bozone Ron as we called him) and that harlot Maggie Thatcher that conspired to burn every spare molecule of oxygen out of the atmosphere and turn the earth to rust.  On the way to the goal we have to pass through a little period of global warming, high seas and foul weather, but that’s not the Bush family’s fault.  Well, in a way it is.  They’re the freakozoid alien monsters that signed the pact with Satan and burned off Kuwait, pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than at any time since the great terminal extinction at the end of the cretaceous period.  Daddy and Barbara do have a basement shrine to Chthulu and it was daddy who dreamed up the prank of dropping the nuke down the pipe at Pinatubo, cooling things off a bit by pumping millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere and depriving the Philipine government of the use of Clark AFB, the US lease to which coincidentally expired that month.  But if the sufur dioxide could be considered a trade-off for the megatons of CO2 released in Kuwait, there is really nothing that can compensate for the tons of gamma radiation sickness and heavy metal poisoning that the Bush family has fostered in SouthWest Asia through their use of depleted uranium munitions.  Pundits have noted the matched father/son Mercedes SLRs with the cute bumper stickers.  One says, "I’m a friend of Bill W." and the other says "I’m a friend of Adnan Khashoggi."  It’s not clear whose is whose.

But all that is by way of a backgrounder, a little factual detail to support my theory that the Republicans really are not as compassionate as they would have us believe, and that indeed if there’s a buck to be made then they will likely say fuck the environment.

There is on the web, the wonderful wide web, a site called "unpartisan.com."  Interestingly, I can’t find a site called "nonpartisan.com," but I digress.  At unpartisan.com, there is a little database of blogs neatly sorted by whether the writers have tendencies to favor left-wing or right-wing positions.  When I post on a topic of common interest, unpartisan.com occasionally excerpts the post, sends me a track-back and parks me in the column on the left.  Go figure.  I think of myself as more of a fair and balanced guy.  I have met Glenn Reynolds and remained civil.  Today I pointed to Andy Carvin’s mobcast on Katrina, an effort itself so nonpartisan that there would be no way I could warp it into a dirty, commie, pinko, socialist, cuban-loving, venezuela-supporting, swedish-suicidal thing at all.  But the post ended up in the unpartisan.com left column, a place I always thought was reserved for my impassioned defense of Che Guevara and Huey Newton.  So I was scrolling down the page and I noticed something.  The left column is humongously longer than the right column.  The leading and kerning are tight on the left and loose on the right, the fonts smaller on the left and larger on the right, the excerpts shorter on the left and longer on the right — all in some schoolboy attempt to even out the space allocated to both.  But what is obvious is that the right-wing, the Republicans, just don’t care very much about the hurricane, it’s human costs, the environmental issues or much of anything that can’t be debated.  They seem to be saying, "There’s no argument about whether or not the hurricane was a bad thing, so why write about it?"  From the right, there are currently 41 posts from about 30 blogs relating to the devastation.  From the left, there are 60 posts from 60 blogs.  From this I conclude that, while not entirely oblivious to suffering or devoid of care, the right wing is simply less emotional and sympathetic than the left.

Incidentally, Barbara Bush was really pissed that her husband allowed all those cooling sulfur dioxide gases to escape from the volcano and screw up the master plan to return the earth to a uniform mesozoic tropical beach front climate and geography.  Hence the intense marketing of SUV’s in the later nineties and early naughts.