Subscribe"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"
What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas.
[Jimmy Allison] was hoping to use the visit in Florida to convince Bush to turn down the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee because he didn't trust Nixon or his palace guard. "He had been so appalled at the Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson group, and he thought they'd sacrifice George. He just wanted to warn him, as a friend," Allison told me.
Then later, as the Allisons took their leave, Barbara "thanked" them for their Christmas present with unexpected cruelty. "She said, 'I'm so sorry, but we've been so busy this year that we didn't have time to do anything for our political acquaintances.' I swear to God, I'll never forget those two words as long as I live. For her to say that was absolutely appalling. Mind you, Jimmy was an old, old friend. And I had stayed as a houseguest with the Bushes, been invited in my pajamas into their bedroom to read the papers and drink coffee while Bar rode her exercise bicycle.
"Big George was just stricken by this," Allison continued. "There was a wet bar in the hall on the way to the front door. He grabbed this moldy bottle of Mai Tai that he said had been given to him by the president of China, and he said we just had to have it. Then he plucked this ostrich egg in a beaded bag from a shelf that he said had been given to him by the ambassador to the U.N. from Nigeria or someplace, and gave it to us. Can you imagine how embarrassing that was?"
The hurricane may well prompt, as Obama said, "a more serious conversation about the plight of people in the inner city."
He warned against using a "false dichotomy" to analyze the situation -- an incorrect assumption that there are only two answers to a question -- whereby the answer to what went on in New Orleans gets boiled down to either a failure of personal responsibility or of mutual, or societal, responsibility.
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I can just see her, huddled on her army cot, two feet away on each side from all of her neighbors.
Forced to sleep next to the homeless woman who talks to herself and screams in the middle of the night.
Clutching at her stuff for fear that someone will take it.
Only reluctantly leaving her cot to wait in lines at the bathrooms and public showers.
Returning from the showers, only to find her stuff stolen and her cot taken.
Forced to wait in line for thrift store clothing and a blanket, wrapping it around herself, and sleeping in an uncomfortable stadium seat in the upper deck, head covered so that the stadium lights don't keep her awake.
Staying like that until she wakes up with swolen ankles and aches and pains too numerous to mention.
Finally taking someone else's cot, only to have an angry black woman, kids in tow, yelling at her about two inches from her face, the black woman's kids crying, asking where daddy is and wanting to go home, asking questions about their dead, drowned dog that their mother just can't answer.
The family will stay there for six weeks, before getting sent away even further from the city they loved, to another shelter in Nebraska, a thousand miles away from anyone they know, far, far away from their relatives in Alabama, no money to get there anyway, no prospects for the mother to get another job... and they still don't know where daddy has gone.
Yeah. It's really working out very well for them, isn't it?!
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:41 AM on September 6, 2005