bad weather and bad news

i don't know how much money the feds have spent in Iraq. i did see that Rumsfeld gave a speech about how some people lack the courage for the war on terror. i am not so sure about that. I think it's got more to do with fighting a war that has achievable objectives. it's tough to go to war on an idea. the best part about Rummy's complaints is that he is asserting that the war in Iraq is the same as the war on terror. in point of fact, there is no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with terrorists. (this reminds me of the "debate" over intelligent design - as in, there is no debate; pretty sure i've talked about this already) that's a clever piece of unsubstantiated correlative reasoning, Mr. Rumsfeld. and by "clever" I mean "bullsh*t".

not sure it is fair to compare the war effort in Iraq to the effort to clean up New Orleans, but i'm going to do it anyway. we've spent an average of a billion dollars a week in Iraq (I made up that number, but you can make up your own if you want to. half a billion? fine.) the war is 5 years old this month, so that makes, umm, carry the one, divide by suicide bombers, add broken levees, subtract no-bid contracts... ahhh, $200 billion we've spent so far? whatever. this is just a theoretical exercise.

so how much safer would we be if we spent some of that money on rebuilding new orleans? even at a high level, if we just rebuilt infrastructure, provided security to run down neighborhoods, and helped people get their lives put back together. the sort of thing we are doing so ineffectively in Iraq. we'll never know. i do know that the most beat down neighborhoods are predominantly black. and, more importantly, oil-free.

let me ask the question this way: if the citizens of new orleans had started blowing shit up when the hurricane hit, would we send in the army? the answer: yes, but much too late. i think it's weird that the US of A will invade a sovereign nation to remove a dictator that has no known terrorism link, but we can't invade a city overrun by disaster that is inside our own borders.
maybe weird isn't the right word. maybe the right word is "asinine".

didn't mean to get all political on you. it's just that the war is a joke and NO is a mess and the federal government is still doing its fear-mongering best to hide their inadequacy, from the top on down. it is depressing.