I don't believe in hell, but I wish it existed only for Dummy Rumsfeld. He doesn't even have the decency to act concerned.

I'd love to find any stats on Rumsfeld's approval rating among troops.

i always look forward to reading this section in time magazine

Does Time do this kind of index? I think it originated with Harpers.

I preferred the Wilson Quarterly over Harpers.

By the numbers wrap-up... nice.

Yep, this is from Harper's, but it's a good idea nonetheless.

Harpers is my favorite magazine. Kudos to The Stranger for stealing from the best! Now I don't have to wait for Harpers to come out to get my index.

Time magazine has a regular side bar that, unlike Harpers, follows the # - factoid format as above.

KATRINA UPDATE, July 2006:

NYT Book Review, 9 July 2006

'Hell & High Water' - David Oshinsky (Review of 'The Great Deluge', Douglas Brinkley)

Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center warned the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, that his city was in peril.

For Brinkley, who teaches history at Tulane University in New Orleans,
Katrina has a deeply personal edge. One can easily read 'The Great Deluge' as a morality tale, pitting helpless victims, heroic citizens and a few decent politicians against an inept bureaucracy at every link in the chain. This was an avoidable catastrophe, more the fault of man than of nature, Brinkley says, and those responsible must be held to account.

City administrators had done no serious hurricane planning, despite repeated warnings from the scientific community.

Though Nagin 'strongly advised' people to leave, he didn't issue a mandatory evacuation order until the following day. By then, about 20 percent of the 460,000 residents were still in the city.

Buses were supposed to evacuate them, but many of the drivers had fled the city and hardly anyone knew where to go to be picked up. Among the most infamous photos of the Katrina disaster are the ones showing rows of buses sitting idly on flooded ground.

Survivors straggled into the Superdome and the convention center ... Rarely have so many desperate Americans been so completely abandoned by their government.

The White House was remote and unresponsive, viewing natural disaster
relief as a distraction from the war on terror. ... In one instance, dozens of first responders -- including firefighters and paramedics -- were diverted from New Orleans to Atlanta 'for training on rules against sexual harassment.'

[The Cajun Navy: rural whites who strapped their boats to their pickups and traveled in caravans to New Orleans. Sweeping through black neighborhoods by day, sleeping in their trucks at night, the Cajuns saved close to 4,000 lives.]

On the local level, Brinkley sees one villain above all. The Ray Nagin we meet in these pages is part coward, part showboat, part Uncle Tom. A pawn of the city's business elite, 'always deferential to whites,' he sold out his race. ... When it comes to poor people, the book suggests, the mayor couldn't have cared less.

It was Nagin who waited too long to order a mandatory evacuation, who left the buses to rot, who turned his back on those who couldn't leave. It was Nagin, 'terrified for his own personal safety,' who rarely visited the frantic throngs at the Superdome and the convention center ...

KATRINA UPDATE, March 2006:

Manager, KIRO/Entercom:

In the early hours of Thursday morning, Turi Ryder (who used to be such
a nice girl before she started simulating a Wal-Mart party-doll version of Erin Hart) said that Bush lied and New Orleans died. Ryder's DNC
mantra was repeated by Procaccino and Upshaw, who said last night that Bush let 1,300 poor Katrina blacks die because they weren't rich whites. Then, after midnight, Ryder came back and said that Bush "is a big fat liar." Why? Because, as Upshaw tried to demonstrate when he played AP's pilfered tape of a pre-Katrina conference call, Bush was clearly warned by the Hurricane Center that levees could be breached before Bush proclaimed that nobody expected that levees could be breached.

Here's the problem: Upshaw's AP tape says nothing about breached levees. The potential problem being discussed by the Hurricane Center is "topped" levees, water splashing over from Pontchartrain and moistening Upshaw's two (!) rich, white homes.

Here's another problem: AP's stolen tape was part of a series, the part in which Bush listened while Brownie ran the conference, coordinating with emergency planners from five or six states toward which Katrina was erratically heading. Your people bash Bush for not running the seminar, for not doodling, for not interrogating. They bash him for not doing the things on AP's tape that George Stephanopoulis says he had already done at prior conference calls.

Here's another problem: By the time of AP's tape, Bush was urging a somnolent Nagin to make evacuations mandatory, and was encouraging Blanco to "nationalize" disaster response so federal troops could be moved in quickly if needed. (I heard Nagin on Sunday before the storm. He was so laid back -- people should maybe think about leaving, he said -- that he sounded sedated. The shrieking came later. As for Blanco, as an inept southern Democrat, she was reluctant to revive Reconstruction by letting Republicans call the shots and run the show.)

Your people have bent the truth as badly as Howard Dean bends the truth. In fact, my bet is that Ryder, Procaccino, and Upshaw got their
talking points from Dean or somebody in between. Upshaw's attempt to smear President Bush with charges of latent racism came straight from Kanye West: Bush doesn't care about black people. In fact, the real racism is New Orleans was displayed by "mainstream" liberal "mews" media that circulated baseless slanders about black people shooting rescue helicopters from the sky, raping children at the dome, and
murdering each other at the convention center.

Liberal KIRO and your liberal liars who baselessly accuse the president of being a liar owe us an apology. You owe him, "Moron Bush" as Mike Webb called him, an apology. Bush could have done better in New Orleans; he should have shoved Louisiana's corrupt Democrats aside. But he deserves better than Entercom's slander. Apologize.

KATRINA UPDATE, via Jim Miller:

Bumbling by top disaster-management officials fueled a perception of general inaction, one that was compounded by impassioned news anchors.
In fact, the response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest--and
fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm's landfall.

Dozens of National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters flew rescue
operations that first day--some just 2 hours after Katrina hit the coast. Hoistless Army helicopters improvised rescues, carefully hovering on rooftops to pick up survivors. On the ground, "guardsmen had to chop their way through, moving trees and recreating roadways," says Jack Harrison of the National Guard. By the end of the week, 50,000 National Guard troops in the Gulf Coast region had saved 17,000 people; 4000 Coast Guard personnel saved more than 33,000.

These units had help from local, state and national responders, including five helicopters from the Navy ship Bataan and choppers from the Air Force and police. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries dispatched 250 agents in boats. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA), state police and sheriffs' departments launched rescue flotillas. By Wednesday morning, volunteers and national teams joined the effort, including eight units from California's Swift Water Rescue. By Sept. 8, the waterborne operation had rescued 20,000.

While the press focused on FEMA's shortcomings, this broad array of local, state and national responders pulled off an extraordinary success--especially given the huge area devastated by the storm. Computer simulations of a Katrina-strength hurricane had estimated a worst-case-scenario death toll of more than 60,000 people in Louisiana. The actual number was 1077 in that state.

The Times says Bush failed to deliver; the fact is that Bush helped organize "by far the largest--and fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history". When the gap between the beliefs at the Seattle Times and
reality is this large, it is hard to know what to say. The best I can do is recycle an old joke: Suppose Bush came to this area and, as part of his exercise routine, walked across Puget Sound. How would the Times headline this feat? As follows: "Bush Fails in Effort to Swim Sound".

KATRINA UPDATE, via Popular Mechanics:

www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/2315076.html

Erica, it's more like the Mourning news. There were also about 7 american GI's killed over the weekend.

FROGMARCH UPDATE: Isakoff at Newsweek makes it semi-official ... Joe Wilson jerked you people around. Neoliberal Richard Armitage of the State Dept is the compulsive gossip who started the PlameNameBlameGame by whispering 'Valerie' to Woodward & Novak. Fitzgerald knew it was Armitage, but kept his Grand Jury jurying for months, years, hoping to trip up someone from the White House with inconsistent testimony. (Democrat activist & law prof, Susan Estrich, tried to tell Stephanie Miller that there was no underlying crime to support Fitzgerald's indictment of Libby.)

MILLER UPDATE: She persists, month after month, in imputing racism to Limbaugh for his comments about Osama Obama, the rock star currently touring Kenya. Yes, Limbaugh did say 'Osama Obama,' but only after playing an old tape of old Democrat Ted Kennedy, who blathered at length about 'Osama Obama.' It's remotely possible that Senator Kennedy was drunk, dazed, & confused, but he gets the Gold. He said it first.

Looking for someone who is going to be stealing from Harper's? Look to the Seattle Times...

Also starting this coming week is a new package containing humor columnist Andy Borowitz and the Harper's Index, an accumulation of thoughtful numbers.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003226305_vesely27.html

@Kat 5: sooo, Bush is your version of Jesus, eh? As far as the tape goes, "topping" the levies doesn't mean that "oooh, a little water spray splashed onto my driveway!" It means the water crests over the top which would likely cause the levee to fail. Hence, a breached levy. Bush did lie, but that's just in his nature. But Nagin is to blame as well, I'd agree with that.

@ - : PlameNameBlameGame. Funny how pithy you neo-con's can be when it's your own party that commits treason.

Levees: www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/2315076.html

Bush = Jesus? Bush = JC, for sure, but the JC isn't Jesus Chrust. It's Jimmy Carter, worst president of the last century & worst ex-pres ever:

- Laissez les Bush Bash Rouler! -

Mired in quagmire from a war he couldn't win or end, George W. Bush was
swept away two weeks ago by a force-five media hurricane. A sodden
presidency paddles and prattles among the ruins, but this administration -- like the uncounted corpses ("only" 400?) of St. Bernard Parish -- is dead in the water, and the President is a dead man talking. The conservatism that Bush nominally represented is also gone with the wind, collaterally damaged to death by the storm and the toxic stew boiling up from Lake Pontchartrain.

The media briefly gave President Bush a platform for at least the appearance of moral clarity in 2001, and he filled the moment masterfully. He rallied America from the top of a bus and blew past the imperial media with a bullhorn.

He defied the odds and the odd (leftists Michael Moore, Mike Webb,
Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd) by chilling Afghanistan, a terrorists' incubator, with American resolve. Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, the Author Formerly Known as Anonymous, asserts that America's Afghan adventure is a flawed work in progress, but it was and is progress. Unlike the evil Soviet empire that spent a decade's lives and treasure flailing in Afghanistan, President Bush did not fail. That came later.

The President was a gambler who won one, then forgot to cut and count the cards. He gambled for bigger jackpots without learning the fundamentals, when to hold and when to fold. He bet it all on a big play, a world-historical attempt to recalibrate the world's clashing civilizations with a Wilsonian micrometer. And, like President Wilson
making the world safe for imposed democracy, President Bush failed. Unlike Wilson, Bush was utterly unable or unwilling to explain himself and his failure. When hundreds of Americans came home in Baghdad bags, when thousands of Americans came home in traction and trauma, he vanished into a void of incoherence or aphasia that the media and those unhinged by hatred (Moore, Webb, Rich, Dowd, Cindy Sheehan -- the Left's favorite anti-Semitic Gold-Star mom) were eager to fill.

Also filling the void were the ghosts of President Wilson, destroyed by a bad war and a bad peace, and a century's other failed warrior presidents. Dissipating moral clarity or clarity of any kind, squandering political capital he hadn't clearly earned, Bush's long hot Crawford summer of cowering in Cindy Sheehan's shadow smelled like the
failed Final Days of Presidents Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon.

(Bush, said conservative Rush Limbaugh, was entirely too Nixonian, meaning that Bush with his pork-packed agenda and drunken-Democrat spending was entirely too liberal with other people's money. Bush even in the face of failure, was gonna party like it's 1929. Seldom, wrote James Fallows in The Atlantic, perhaps never, had a president gambled
away the fundamentals of his nation's soundness and solvency. And he gambled away the public's trust. In the hazy crazy days of Crawford, Bush's popularity tanked past the minimum point of no return that -- said an obscene politician named Lyndon Johnson -- any (male) politician with a pulse could count on unless he was caught with a dead girl or a live boy.)

Even surrounded in early August by the protective coloration of Texas boots and saddles, President Bush couldn't avoid the void of All Hat and No Cattle. A void is a hole, and the First Law of Political Holes is this: If you don't want to be in one, stop digging. My corollary to the First Law of Holes is this: Even if you stop digging, you're still in the hole.

Even if, in the long hot summer of 2005, the President had stopped digging Iraq sand and had stopped digging away at the sand foundation of an economic house of cards built by the levee in a fools' paradise, he and we would still be in a hole contemplating his void. And we, even those of us who wanted him to succeed, would be seeing the ghosts
of failed presidents past, of Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, failures who hadn't started no-win wars. Conservative revolutionary Peggy Noonan suggested months ago that President Bush had unnecessarily made too much history and too many orphans.

Then Katrina came.

August 2005 is our August 1914. Or perhaps it is our Fort Sumter, a moment when history divided.

A president who had only one evident qualification for the presidency, that he wasn't Weird Al Gore (who did good work in Louisiana last week), was washed away. The 40-year legacy of conservatism that Bush rode in on (he turned it into bloated big-government conservatism) was washed away. So was Democrat Camille Paglia's previous condition of certitude that the Republican essence is mature managerial competence and leadership. "They didn't lead," said Republican Dick Cheney five years ago, "we will. Help is on the way."

I voted for Mr. Cheney in 2000, believing that he'd keep the Crawford
kid out of trouble. I voted for Mr. Cheney in 2004, believing, despite
crushing evidence to the contrary, that he'd pull a Bullwinkle rabbit out of the President's Stetson.

After Katrina, Mr. Cheney and a shadow presidency still go through motions and actions and reactions. A shadow president still practices at walking the void, incoherent and aphasic, unable or unwilling to make even the simplest answer to the toxic slander that the inheritor of the Republican party of Lincoln, a warrior president who emancipated America's slaves, is a racist. For Bush and my party, help is not on the way, or it will be very slow in coming, as it was for the citizens
of St. Bernard Parish.

Six years ago at the Republican convention, having promised that help is on the way, Dick Cheney said other words that some of us remember entirely too well: It's time for them to go.

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