When I woke up this morning, using my television as an alarm clock, the channel was automatically set to Fox News.  I expected to hear the usual yappage (yeah, I just made that up) about the GOP convention, about McCain/Palin, etc.  What I did hear was "breaking news" - yes, BREAKING NEWS - about a hurricane that did absolutely no damage to New Orleans whatsoever. 

Yeah, get this, folks.  The fact that there was no carnage from Hurricane Gustav dominated the news this morning.  The levees held up.  Oil prices plunged.  There was no significant damage.  And yet, I had to see Geraldo's fat face on my screen this morning reporting on what COULD have happened HAD Gustav caused more damage to the city, and watch that asshat Nagin pat himself on the back, proud that this time he didn't facilitate the deaths of thousands of people by allowing hundreds of buses, which might have been used for evacuation purposes, to sit idle while the poor and elderly perished.

Assholes.

I also had to listen to half drunken, barely literate nimrods who refused to heed the order to evacuate the city, talk about how they were ready to brave this one... 

That just pisses me off!

During Katrina, when thousands decided they were going to brave the storm, and paid dearly for it when the hurricane slammed into the city, thousands of National Guard troops were deployed in support of relief efforts, including Brad and me.  Nagin, who didn't even consider that maybe using New Orleans buses to evacuate those who were either too stupid to leave, or simply incapable of doing so might be a good idea, screeched about the lack of national response - as if his inability of forethought and sheer incompetence were somehow the rest of the country's fault.

The local NAACP screeched that we took too long to get there, claiming that we were too busy evacuating rich folks from the Garden District to help the poor black folks anywhere else...  I remember how pissed I was when I blogged about it the first time, so it bears repeating here.

Most of the Guardsmen in this unit got little more than a few hours' notice that they were deploying down here. They grabbed their gear and were on their way in less than a day. They had to ensure their families and homes were well taken care of and had very little time to do so. Their employers got little notice they were leaving as well.

We convoyed out here. We didn't fly. We drove a bunch of very hot, noisy, shaky Humvees, which despite common misperceptions, do not even remotely resemble luxury automobiles like the Hummers on the market today.

Air conditioning is defined as either unzipping your windows (yes, some of them are plastic) or taking the doors off your vehicle completely. Convoy speed is generally between 45 and 50 mph. The Humvee starts to shake badly once you exceed that speed, and since it gets slightly more miles to one gallon of gas than your average gas guzzler, stops to refuel are frequent.

Oh, and did I mention the dust that constantly swirls inside this vehicle? After a day of driving, you can generally scrape several layers of grime off your face and still not reach the top layer of skin. The seats don't lean back, as they do in Mr. [Alfred] Doucette's (First Vice President of the Lake Charles NAACP at the time) luxury automobile. Hell, the seats barely have backs to them...

Oh, and let's talk about sleeping conditions. Sometimes we slept in hotels, but most of the time, we slept on hard floors in National Guard armories in several states, buildings resembling chicken coops, and our vehicles.

Yes, while Mr. Doucette sat in his air-conditioned office, pondering how racist the National Guard was, we were barely sleeping, barely showering and eating MREs in an effort to get down here to get castigated by him.

And for your information, Mr. Doucette - WE DID NOT RESCUE ANY FUCKING WHITE RICH FOLKS FROM NEW ORLEANS. NONE. What we DID do was deliver water and beds to evacuees in Lake Charles and its neighboring towns. What we DID do was provide security at the Civic Center and the Burton Coliseum, without regard to whether or not the people to whom we were providing said security were white, black, purple or polka dotted. What we DID do was receive and return hugs from little children without any regard for their race (and yes, for your damn information, many of them were black). And we got here as quickly as we could, under conditions you probably couldn't even imagine from your plush, air-conditioned office or your NAACP-funded, comfortable home.

Yeah, they didn't bother to evacuate, and then blamed us for not responding quickly enough to their stupidity. 

Now, they're patting themselves on the back that they evacuated the city for basically no reason, and this is major news?  I guess the fact that Nagin can be taught, and that Louisiana finally has a governor that's worth a damn is newsworthy...