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.
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thoughtless in the Catskills
I don’t have a thought of my own tonight. Ernie the Attorney (whose blog I found from Jeneane, who lives in Atlanta but not where the tornado tore through) has managed to get out of New Orleans after going back…
This societies’ reality is to SINK or SWIM. Watching this tragedy unfold and seeing how incompetent State and Federal “authorities” are, how unprepared they were, how totally overwhelmed everybody was; shows where the PRIORITIES in American society are today!
In a SINK or SWIM society this is what happens before, during, and after an event of this kind.
Hi, this is Cameron Brooks, founder of unpartisan.com. Thanks for your comments on the site. Just so you know, unpartisan.com is currently in its beta stage, so certain problems with tracking and categorizing sites are being worked out constantly.
That said, there is one thing I need to point out that you are mistaken about: There is no difference in the font size, spacing, or line height between the lists of liberal and conservative blog postings, and you’re welcome to check out the CSS file if you don’t believe me. There are roughly the same number of liberal blog sites being tracked as their are conservative, and the criteria for including a blog post is exactly the same regardless of political leaning. There have been, however, more posts from liberal blogs recently than there have been from conservative blogs. Perhaps this is because the president has fallen on difficult times, or perhaps it is because conservative bloggers coordinate their vacation times to coincide with the president’s.
Ok, joking aside, I am looking into it to ensure that there isn’t any bias present in my sorting and categorization algorithms. As for why you are being categorized as liberal, please see the FAQ on my site. Thank you for your interest in unpartisan.com!
Cameron, thank you for your comment. I was setting up unpartisan.com as a straw man just so I could be snarky. I like what you have there, and indeed I am aware that the typography is laid out in CSS the same in both the left and right columns. Also, I’m a liberal through and through so you have me categorized correctly. I was having a bit of fun in a larger context though admittedly at your expense. You may have received four or five extra hits out of my link and there is maybe a somewhat broader awareness of your site based on my post, so all in all, I hope you can forgive my strange satirical moment. (You’ll notice that as of today, the commentary has turned political and others are actually blaming the president in less broadly satiric terms.)
the above two INTELLECTUAL comments PROVE that INTELLECUALS regardless of LIBERAL or CONSERVATIVE need to get a LIFE or die trying in a hurricane like KATRINA!