Rule by the worst just got worse

Can these things be? Is this madness? Is there no way to rise up and break the neck of the monsters, the true monsters, of this administration that is crushing us into the ground? We are ruled by something fantastically biblical, some combination of brainless Behemoths. And they are murdering us. And we do nothing. This is Bush's Chernobyl moment. And we watch it, and people die and die and die.

“100 said dead in Chalmette
Thursday, 9:46 p.m.

About 100 people have died at the Chalmette Slip after
being pulled off their rooftops, waiting to be ferried
up the river to the West Bank and bused out of the
flood ravaged area, U.S. Rep. Charles Melancon,
D-Napoleonville, said Thursday.

About 1,500 people were at the slip on Thursday
afternoon, where critical supplies like food and water
are scarce, he said. Melancon expressed serious
frustration with the slow pace of getting these items
to the people waiting to finish their journey to
safety.

Many of those at the slip were evacuated from a shelter set up at Chalmette High School that suffered massive flooding as the waters rose during Hurricane Katrina.

Melancon said people are being plucked out of their water-surrounded
houses, but the effort to get them out of Chalmette
and provide them with sufficient sustenance is the
problem.

While he did not directly criticize the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, Melancon said they are
ultimately responsible for making sure that people are
taken care of. “That is where the buck stops,” said
Melancon at a briefing at the state Office of
Emergency Preparedness.

People at the slip indicated that 100 people had died
since they arrived, although Melancon said he did not
know how they perished.”

My brother, who has been in four major hurricane clean up operations (including Hugo) as a volunteer, thinks that the big mistake in NOLA is to rely on the military, instead of letting people back into the city to self organize and get their things. In some ways, he's right. It is unlikely that the Chalmette one hundred would have died if there were ... well, a lot of people around. The nightmare is that the government has cut off the region and shuttled people to points where they are abandoned. The looting occupies the press, and not the mass slaughter. But the mass slaughter is infinitely more dangerous. The Chertoffs of this world are killing off more than the gangbangers.

And this is our American civilization. Beautiful, ain't it?

ps -- 11 a.m, Friday: more evidence that my brother is right. The blood of how many hundreds is now on the hands of the state -- at every level. This is from a Nola account that, as is the fashion of the Times - Pic, weighs the life of the black human being at a four to one rate with the life of white human beings. Thus, more print and blame is bestowed on the wounding of one national guardsman than the deaths -- due directly to malign neglect by the Federal Government -- of those souls in the Civic Center:

"A cluster of refugees attempted to leave the city by way of the Crescent City Connection, only to be blocked on grounds that the crossing was unsafe for pedestrians. At the suggestion of officials, they retreated to the Superdome, where they learned that the bus convoy to Texas was closed to new arrivals."

Anarchy, we are told, can't work. The Bush culture is offering an alternative that is succeeding in devaluing any action by the state. Far better to abolish the thing than to have this.