The Voice of Treason

N.O. Mayor Nagin made an ass of himself again this week when he announced that New Orleans was back. Odd, since just days before this announcement he insisted that the city was dead and so were 10,000 or more of its (poor, black) residents. “Come on back (we need the money)!”

Uh, not so soon. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen stepped in and said that this was a bad idea. There’s no potable water and no way to call for help if someone has an emergency. His list of reasons why this was a dumbass idea was longer and - oh! - there’s another hurricane coming. Mayor Ray was ticked off. He said: “I’m gone for two days and this guy is suddenly the new crowned federal mayor of New Orleans.” Well, it was longer than two days, because buying a new house in Dallas requires some time.

Somebody must have pulled the Mayor aside and pointed out that it would look bad on his resume to have people die in his city after he invited them back. He called a press conference and told residents to stay away and “if you’re here, get out.” Then he said we’re one big team - even if we don’t always agree - and we have a job to do. And he presented Allen with an “I (heart) N.O.” t-shirt.

When the mayor decides that he doesn’t want to take any questions, he calls in John Wayne. That would be LTG Russel Honore.

Honore shouted the plan at the reporters, who then asked why this plan is in place for Rita but didn’t happen for Katrina. He exploded: “All you reporters are stuck on stupid! Don’t get stuck on stupid! We’re trying to move forward and you’re still stuck on stupid!” (Odd that Nagin calls Honore “a John Wayne dude,” since Wayne was a white Republican who was known to the world as a cowboy. Hmmmm.)

But I digress. Honore’s outburst was, on the surface, offensive, but he has a point. We’re stuck on stupid. The news has been full of interesting stories and the average American doesn’t know it because we’re stuck on Katrina - specifically on how New Orleans was affected. Those people in those other states don’t matter.

George Bush’s nomination of Karen Hughes for undersecretary of State for public diplomacy got very little attention. Even less attention was paid when Bush chose Dina Powell, the Egyptian-born former White House personnel director, to be Hughes’ deputy.

There were elections again in Afghanistan. The press sneered that it was a low turnout. True, like most democracies, it was a lower turnout than the presidential election, but people still turned up to vote in large numbers on a ballot that’s the size of the Sunday New York Times. And Floridians had trouble with a butterfly ballot? And in the case of the Afghan voters, they really were risking their lives to vote.

Speaking of elections, what’s up with Germany? This is a huge story and it’s getting no attention. Angela Merkel, the more conservative Bush-friendly candidate, should have won easily, but she and Gerhard Schroeder are practically tied. Who is Chancellor? It’s like 2000 all over again. You’d expect the media to jump on that bandwagon, but they’re still stuck on stupid.

Iran is acting up again, cracking down on women who think they can get away with being attractive. North Korea is talking about dropping their nuclear weapons programs. (Yeah, right!) Things have been happening between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel gave up all that land and no one’s interested enough to see what happens next. Will Sharon and Netanyahu kiss and make up? What’s the future of Likud?

Simon Wiesenthal has died. That should be a huge story. John Roberts may be confirmed this week. A new nominee will be named soon. Huge! Bush will alter the Court! Uh, maybe it’s good the media’s so stuck on stupid.

Young girls have been abducted, people are missing, murders have been committed. But CNN is stuck on the people missing from New Orleans who really aren’t missing. The numbers, again, are inflated.

But maybe we can get unstuck a little. Rita’s coming. For a few days we watched Jeb Bush clearly spell out what the plan was and how Florida was prepared for yet another hurricane. Then he spelled it out in Spanish. Barbara’s right: Jeb should be President.

But Rita’s path has changed. She’s headed towards Houston. All week the focus has been on how Rita will affect New Orleans. Not Florida, not Alabama, not Mississippi. Just Nawlins.

Rita might not even touch New Orleans. It looks like her plan is to go after the poor black evacuees in Texas. See? No good deed ever goes unpunished.

I don’t worry about George W. Bush. I used to; in fact, early in his presidency I was convinced that some loon was going to assassinate him. I’ve learned to relax. I’ve learned that both George and Laura are tough and they know precisely what they’re in for. And they know that when it’s over they have Crawford, the twins, the dogs, and a life. George will be fine, and that makes me feel better.

I used to worry about his dad. Every nasty remark was one I took personally. My sister asked me one day in 1992: “He’s your president, isn’t he?” And I thought at the time she was right, but I’m not so sure now. I even thought for a while that his son might be.

My sister adored Reagan, but Nixon was her president. As I mentioned before, she was devastated when he died on her birthday. I’m not sure I’ve had my president yet. I’ve lived with ten so far. Eleven, if you count Hillary. I was too young to form an opinion about Ike - he was on his way out of office and I was busy drooling on myself and analyzing the ceiling. I do remember when Kennedy was shot. And I remember my sister speculating that my mother might have voted for him based on her reaction. Another family mystery.

I remember LBJ always had a heavy heart, liked to show his scars, and lifted his dogs by their ears in front of reporters. I liked Nixon. Ford seemed nice enough, but a little dull, and tried hard to make the best of a bad situation. Carter was a travesty. Reagan confirmed that. Bush might have been better off if he hadn’t tried to be kinder and gentler, but I think - given the choice - he’d rather be kind than president.

The Clintons were…don’t get me started. I was just getting to the point where I could get past how much I disliked them, then George Bush reintroduced them to the country. It started with those damned portraits. Like his dad, Dubya was kind and gracious, and next thing you know…Bill’s out of hiding and in our faces again.

Former presidents should be seen and not heard - unless they’re specifically asked by the current administration to consult. Johnson retired to the ranch. Nixon waved goodbye, went home to San Clemente, then quietly wrote and played golf. He consulted when asked, and traveled abroad. He moved east. He was productive, yet still managed to keep a relatively low profile.

Ford, without the burden of the presidency, actually seemed to flourish after leaving office. Just about everyone agrees that Carter has made a better ex-President. I think that’s because anything he does outside the presidency is preferable. To me, he’s still a self-absorbed, bitter little man who won’t go away quietly. It disturbs me that he’s asked for his opinions when he has no right to criticize other administrations. He couldn’t do the job then; what makes him qualified now?

Reagan went back to the ranch and his life became private for the first time in decades. George and Barbara moved to a modest, oddly-shaped home in Houston. George kept quiet about Bill Clinton.

Sigh. If only Bill Clinton could keep quiet about Bill Clinton.

I confess. I occasionally land on PBS and I’ll watch. On Friday afternoon, I switched off talk radio and cable news and watched Nature. It was riveting.

In the early ’90s, a red-tailed hawk suddenly appeared in Central Park and quickly became a local celebrity. “Pale Male” flew into town and took up residence in one of the most chichi areas of Manhattan. He moved to a ledge of a building where both Woody Allen and Mary Tyler Moore lived, and where - as one local confided - Barbra Streisand had wanted to live but was rejected.

Smart bird. The park is full of tasty treats like rats, mice, squirrels, and - yum! - pigeons. People who never would have thought about even looking at a bird were suddenly camped out in the park near the boat pond to get a better look at this hawk - this predator. They cheered when he’d swoop down on an innocent squirrel or pigeon and gobble it down. One guy - who’d been unemployed for a while - had nothing better to do, so he started watching the bird, too. Soon he was rubbing elbows with millionaires, talking to people he never thought would give him the time of day. Poor people, rich people, men, women, children, homeless, Jews, Muslims, Christians, whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics. Dogs. All gathered at all hours to watch the bird.

Then one day another hawk appeared. A female. The watchers named her First Love. The two hawks built their nest on that ledge where spikes had been placed to repel pigeons. Conveniently, those spikes provided the perfect foundation for a hawk home. The metal spikes held the nesting material firmly in place. What a view. And the building jutted out above the nest so there was protection from the rain.

New Yorkers watched the pair court. Pale Male would present First Love with rodents and pigeons and she finally gave in. Soon baby red-tailed hawks appeared in the nest. Pale Male tried to lure them out with fat juicy rats, but the babies were afraid to leave. It was a huge drop from the ledge to Fifth Avenue. Normally, baby birds have the safety net of trees, but Pale Male had chosen the ledge to be away from the crows.

Drama! At one point, the crows - at least twenty of the bastards - came to attack the nest! Pale Male had to protect his home and family and bravely fought the crows off. One New Yorker on the ground commented: “I wish my father had been so attentive.” Pale Male and First Love were teaching the crowd below the elements of family values. The crowd couldn’t get enough.

Drama! One by one, the babies left the nest. One was lifted by a gust of wind and was blown from the nest. Would it be able to fly? Would it fly into a window? Would it hit the street and be struck by a taxi? One baby disappeared. The crowd was distraught and determined to find the lost fledgling. It was rescued and brought to an apartment. Authorities were contacted. The advice? Put it on the terrace and let it fly away. It did.

Drama! One day the crowd saw one of the kids go after a pigeon. This pigeon hadn’t been doing well, so the crowd panicked. What if the pigeon had been poisoned? A member of the crowd pulled the pigeon away from the hawk and put it in the trash. The baby was lucky. Its mother, sadly, was not as fortunate. She had eaten a poisoned pigeon and she died.

First Love was dead. But time passed, and Pale Male found another love. In fact, by the end of this show, Pale Male was on his fourth wife and had more than twenty-five kids.

Joanne Woodward narrated. I admit, it was a beautifully produced episode and I was completely taken in. Even T was hooked. At the end, he looked pensive. He was thinking about the day the hawk in our yard almost nailed my favorite pigeon, Martha. “He was on her. He had her. If only I hadn’t walked out there.”

“You saved her life.”

It’s not what he wanted to hear.

I’d mentioned that I’d listened to a little Rush on Friday. What I didn’t mention is that our local radio station broke in for a special report: Breaking News! T and I paused. Our state treasurer and his predecessor had just been arrested. The FBI had been investigating these guys for two years and finally put the cuffs on them. Racketeering! Extortion! Corruption! Threats of violence! Kickbacks spanning a decade! Wow!

T looked at me. “Democrats?”

“Did they mention their party affiliation?”

“No.”

“Then they’re definitely Democrats.”

It’s painfully obvious. Had they been Republicans, the first line of the story would have been: “Republican State Treasurer Blah Blah-Blah has been arrested…” and the R-word would have been repeated at least seven times. In each sentence.

There was no mention of party. I listened to more reports and watched the local news. I read the newspaper. No mention of party. I had to go online to find and confirm it in The Olympian - a paper from Olympia, Washington. The same article appeared in Newsday. But locally, no one wants to say the D-word.

Well, I do live in a D-state.

Bill Kristol has been depressed. He regularly appears on the pundit panel on FNC, and has admitted that this whole Katrina thing has got him down. He just keeps repeating: “It’s depressing.” If memory serves, Bill got depressed very quickly back in ‘92 and practically abandoned George H.W. Bush when things started to go bad in the press. George Bush is out of touch with the average American, but Bill Clinton feels their pain. I wonder if he felt Bill Kristol’s pain. To this day I picture him curled up in the fetal position under his desk repeating endlessly: “It’s over. It’s no use. We can’t win. I’m depressed.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like Bill, but he needs to snap out of it. It’s easy to feel bad because the media is relentless about reporting what’s wrong in the world. Bush’s poll numbers are in the toidy. It’s over. It’s no use.

Well, Bill, I have a miracle cure. Bill, you need to stop hanging around with your New York and D.C. friends (and McCain supporters) and take some “me time.” Take a few hours a day to relax and listen to the radio. Talk radio. Specifically, Rush.

Why has Rush stayed on the air for so long? Why does he still have such a strong base? It’s because Rush gives his listeners a rush. He’s fun, he’s positive, he’s optimistic, he sees a silver lining in every cloud. How he can be accused of being mean-spirited and nasty, I’ll never know. He really is an adorable puffball.

And he made a very good point on Friday’s show. He mentioned an ABC special in which they questioned a group of people who were affected by Katrina (yes, they were black) and tried to get them to blame George Bush. One by one, they heard that these people didn’t blame Bush - if they blamed anyone at all it was Mother Nature, and they were fair about local and state officials who might have dropped the ball, fully aware that this storm was overwhelming. They were essentially upbeat and felt that things would work out. They appreciated hearing that Bush had a plan to rebuild New Orleans.

We’ll be getting less coverage now because whenever a reporter sticks a microphone in someone’s face, they hear something positive. A business owner in the French Quarter even thanked the president for doing such a great job. Another, knee deep in garbage and rotting food pulled from businesses, was even more positive, saying that the city was already coming back to life and it would be better and stronger than ever before.

It reminds me of the joke about another city in our state. “Hear about the tornado? It came through (insert name of town) and did five million dollars of improvements.”

The media now will have to find the negative in this story. They’ll keep talking about the people who aren’t able to rebuild their lives, the victims of this tragedy who have been forgotten. Their marriages have ended, they’re addicts, they’ve been arrested. They’re still poor, so none of this Bush plan actually helped.

But if you listened to Jack Kemp’s speech - uh, I mean George Bush - he talked about rethinking the whole poverty thing. Jack - I mean George - has been talking about poverty a lot. He was just at the U.N. talking about it. He sees what the rest of us see. New Orleans was a failure. Other cities in the South have evolved and grown and prospered, but New Orleans is like that dirty slip or bra strap that peeks out of a woman’s dress. It might appear, on the surface, to be just fine, but peel away the layers and you’ll find some nastiness. Corruption, bad management, terrible poverty, crime, crumbling infrastructure, despair. The mayor can put a happy face on it and call it a “party town” all he wants. It’s still a city that a lot of people had stopped visiting because it was turning into a sewer. Now it really is a sewer so it can only go up from here. Like Bush says, they’re going to rebuild, but build higher.

Conservatives heard the speech and groaned: He’s spending too much! But those of us who paid attention heard that this could be a good thing. We can see the silver lining. We can see…the return of the eighties.

Forbes just published a “return to luxury” issue and it was like I’d been transported to another time. Expensive watches, wingtips, tweeds, velvets - I’d seen all this before. There was even an ad for green tea. The caption: “Green is good.” Get it?

We’ve had to suffer this return to the sixties and seventies with the ugly bohemian fashions of beads, bellbottoms, and lava lamps, and it’s brought out all the nostalgic Boomers who feel like their lives have no purpose. It’s sparked a whole anti-war movement. But if we are really moving back to an eighties period - and I’m hoping for something with the clean lines of Armani - we can fix this mess. Jack Kemp talked about empowerment and enterprise zones in 1980 and he was making perfect sense.

If Bush can reintroduce this, and maybe even put Jack Kemp out there to advise - no, wait. I don’t know if Kemp has a place in the party anymore. A lot of Republicans were horrified by his performance during the vice presidential debate of 1996. He practically turned to the camera and said to America: “This Al Gore is a great guy - hell, I’d even vote for him!” Actually, if memory serves, Kemp did do that. I’ve never heard so many positive things about Gore in my life and they were all coming from his opponent. But that’s typical Jack Kemp. The party should have known.

Anyway, this whole idea of ownership isn’t new. Bush had talked about it and it was part of the domestic agenda before terrorists shifted his administration’s priorities. But it’s why conservatives are frustrated by the Democrats’ vision of the underclass. They need an underclass - that’s their base. Republicans don’t want an underclass. For years these people - like the poor residents of New Orleans - were told that they weren’t smart enough, skilled enough, talented enough to compete and succeed. You are oppressed, white people will never treat you fairly, you don’t need to compete, because we will give you stuff.

Before we left Chicago, they were building high-rises for people who were at a certain economic level. My mother heard about these and thought it would be a good idea if we checked it out. My sister, who was no racist (just a tad misanthropic), finally put her foot down. “Do you want her (meaning me, the youngest) to get raped in an elevator?” Next thing I know we’re moving to a small town in Arizona.

But my sister saw the future. The projects. Cabrini-Green. Whenever I’d go past the “poor” neighborhoods I’d notice certain things. Apartment buildings had broken windows. Everything looked dirty. Things needed to be repaired and painted. There were weeds, but few trees.

That’s where ownership comes in. If you own something, you know how hard you worked for it so you appreciate it. I just planted a tree last week. Trees in the desert are not cheap. It’s difficult to transport a tree. It’s hard to dig a hole and mix the perfect combination of earth and compost to make the tree happy. Then there’s water. You can’t stick it in the ground and forget it.

When I see kids pulling limbs off trees just for the hell of it, I’m appalled. I even have trouble removing a dying tree or pruning a healthy one. If the kid’s parents owned their home and had to buy a tree, dig a hole, plant it and water it, you think they’d let the little bastard destroy it? And if he helped to pick out the tree and got down on his hands and knees in the hot sun and carefully sprinkled dirt around its roots, would he let his little friends pull down and break its branches?

Ownership. Sounds like Bush has been given the opportunity to reintroduce his domestic agenda and try to address the ills of the last forty years. New Orleans could be the prototype. Can you imagine if this works?

We are definitely living in interesting times.

There was an odd moment on The O’Reilly Factor tonight. Bill was interviewing Chuck Schumer and asked him which president had spent the most money addressing poverty. Schumer hesitated, then said: “It was probably Nixon.”

Interesting response. You would have thought the right answer would have been LBJ or Bill Clinton, but it wasn’t. Nixon wasn’t the right answer, either, but it’s intriguing that Schumer named him. Nixon, a brilliant statesman, was vilified by the Left, but the irony was that Nixon was really quite liberal on social issues. Nixon, then, was a very good guess, but the answer is George W. Bush. Dubya has outspent every president on poverty, yet he’s accused of not caring about people. If there’s a group he doesn’t care about, it might just be fiscal conservatives.

It doesn’t matter how compassionate he is or how much money he invests in a program, liberals and blacks aren’t going to vote for him. But by operating as a “compassionate conservative” (and this really riles conservatives because we believe our side is more compassionate so the term is not only redundant but insulting), he’s ticking off his base. The people who, for years, could criticize the Left for spending like drunken sailors.

To hear Schumer say “True, he’s never said no to anything we’ve asked for and he’s never vetoed anything” makes fiscal conservatives bristle. I suspect, if Bush was up for re-election, he would lose a lot of Republican voters to a third, fourth, or fifth party.

Speaking of The Factor, Bill just interviewed Condi Rice, too. I like Condi and I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for her if she ran for office. But if Republicans think she can win because women will vote for a woman and blacks will vote for an African-American candidate, they’re deranged.

If anyone out there doesn’t understand why Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy to go f*ck himself, he or she should stop whatever they’re doing and watch the Roberts confirmation hearings. Leahy, Schumer, Kennedy, Biden, Durbin, Feinstein, Feingold. Halloween’s early this year.

I think I’m right about my idea that cable news is the new theatre. Politics is certainly the new theatre of the absurd, and it doesn’t get much more absurd than this. Andrew Napolitano calls it “grandstanding,” but it’s more than that. It’s free airtime. Each of these elected officials (and I tell you I have so much trouble with that) is up there flapping his or her gums and saying nothing. Biden has the nerve to say Roberts is filibustering? Giving long answers? How? He doesn’t get a chance to say anything because some of Biden’s questions are almost ten minutes long. It’s a monumental waste of time.

The good news is Roberts looks and sounds fabulous. His wife, also an attorney, has been sitting behind him all week with a grim expression on her face. She’s probably biting her tongue to keep from blurting out things like, “Why don’t you just go get another drink, Ted, and shut the hell up?!” Man, he shows up there late, struggles to pull out his chair, then shakes all through his questioning. How’s his health these days? Doesn’t matter. He could be dead and Massachusetts voters would still put him in office. Now that’s a nice change - a dead senator. Usually it’s a case of dead voters. The dead voting for the dead - a new special interest group to court?

But that’s my beef. I’ve been watching the hearings and most of the seats are empty for extended periods. I know Ted left after his monologue to go chat with CNN, but where are the others? Extended bathroom breaks? Getting pedicures? And if I see one of them again turn in his chair and chat with staff while Roberts is trying to answer their questions, I’ll…never mind. I just have to tell myself it’s all part of the show.

There was a cute moment before questioning began when Roberts’ wife, Jane, leaned towards him and said something that cracked him up. The man has a sense of humor that will no doubt get him in trouble so he’s probably on constant self-censor. I can just imagine the things he wants to say and can’t.

The Democrats have got to hate him. His resume is impeccable, his background and education are impressive, his success is inspiring, and worse, he’s young, charming, brilliant, funny, Roman Catholic, and really good to look at.

My fear is that he won’t live to be 127.

Did I hear Ted Kennedy say that what happened in New Orleans was “morally wrong?” Uh, let’s just take a moment to talk about what’s morally wrong, Ted. Oh, never mind. But you have to hand it to him. He has the garbanzos to accuse George Bush of letting innocent people drown. Sorry, there I go again.

Is it me, or are we having a contest to see how many corpses we can produce? It just seems to me that the Democrats are annoyed that George Bush can rally the troops whenever he speaks of the three thousand who died on September 11. It’s almost as if they think that if Katrina can produce more dead bodies, that will somehow diminish the importance of a terrorist attack.

And I certainly don’t mean to diminish the importance of the corpses in the Gulf Coast. It’s just that there has been other news in the world. There have been riots in Belfast. The synagogues in Gaza have been torched by the Palestinians. The death toll in Iraq has spiked. Ophelia is headed towards the Carolinas.

On your marks, get set…GO! Who’s going to win the body count contest? The Palestinians are the clear losers here. The synagogues have been empty and if the Israelis didn’t want them destroyed, they should have removed the buildings themselves. End of story. And things are quieting down in Belfast. Sounds like they lost one male Catholic. Looks like it’s going to be Baghdad and the Carolinas competing for the most cadavers this week.

Right now, New Orleans is leading the pack thanks to St. Rita’s Nursing Home and Memorial Medical Center. I caught a little bit of a news story earlier in the week. Something about an elderly couple and their dog. They were found huddled in the attic of their house. Were they alive or dead? No one seems to care enough to get to the root of this story. My question is this: The blacks have said they were targeted; when are we going to hear from AARP? This is clearly a case of ageism. When all the bodies are sorted out, I want to know how many oldsters were in the mix. Clearly, George Bush doesn’t care about old people.

If that’s true, then most Americans need to take a look at their own feelings about the elderly. The Baby Boomers are terrified of aging, claiming “forty is the new thirty.” (Yeah, tell that to my knees.) They’ve warehoused their parents and, in the case of New Orleans, left it up to the facilities to evacuate their loved ones. If you’re in another state it’s understandable, but if you evacuated the same city, couldn’t you have swung by the home to pick up Mom?

I’ve talked to my mother about relocating because T and I have given a lot of thought to moving to another state. (North Carolina was on our list, but I’ve pretty much scratched that one off the list this week.) She always asks: “What about me?” As if my plan is to leave her here. One of the reasons I haven’t sold the house and moved is that she has settled in here - she doesn’t know where she is, but she likes it - and I don’t want to disrupt any security she feels right now. Frankly, I feel the same way about my dogs. They’ve lived in this house for almost nine years - it’s their home. I don’t want to move them. It’s odd that we’ve spent two weeks talking about race but we haven’t really talked much about people - white, black, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, young, old - losing their homes. Everything that connected them to a place of security — places they loved, worked, raised families, built lives. Gone. It’s more than just wood, plaster, doors, and windows.

It reminds me of Rush’s comments this week. He mentioned that Donald Sutherland had waxed poetic about family values in France. Something like: “The French might make less money because they choose to work 35 hours a week so they can spend more time with their families. In America we let our families drown.”

I’d like to thank Rush for pointing out that almost 15,000 French citizens died during the horrific European heat wave of 2003. I’d also like to thank him for reminding me that nearly 1000 people died from the heat in Chicago in 1995. (Wasn’t Bill Clinton in the White House?) Hey, I lived in those brick tenements in Chicago - it really is like cooking inside a pizza oven. Why weren’t those people evacuated? Clearly, Bill Clinton doesn’t care about Chicagoans. (Remember, he married one.)

But I hope you see my point. It’s a contest to see which administration has killed more people. See, it’s not really about the people; instead, it’s all about the government.

It was a hectic day. I wanted to put some time into job hunting, but I also wanted to listen to Rush and Sean, and watch the Roberts confirmation hearings. Oh, and I had a tree to plant.

I set up a radio and started digging the hole. I was in a talk radio mood, I guess, because I’d heard the local morning show and all the crazies were calling in. “Cora” called to say that she didn’t think George W. Bush hated black people. He hates all people. The morning host pointed out that he’s appointed a diverse group of people and her response was: “They’re just tokens. Every president has to have their tokens. It’s so we won’t think they’re racists, but we know they are.” The host: “So Bill Clinton was a racist?” She hung up.

Another caller who identified herself as a Perot supporter (they’re still out there?), called Bush a “despicable worm.” She went off on his rich friends (Perot is poor?) and said: “Watch. Just watch where the money’s going. We’ll see who owns this worm.”

Host: “Who owns him?”
Caller: “Sharon! Sharon owns him!”

Wow. That’s world class, as Perot would say. The anti-Semites and racists are still out there and they’re on the other side. Which brings me to Mary Landrieu. I’m thrilled that she was the topic of conversation on talk radio today because I just about fell off the ottoman when I watched Chris Wallace interview her on FOX News Sunday. When Chris pointed out that Bush has poured more money into the levee projects than Bill Clinton ever did, she just went off. Bill Clinton wanted to but couldn’t because he was crushed under the weight of the enormous deficit created by the Reagan and Bush (1) administrations. Katrina’s Reagan’s fault now?

But the highlight was when she was asked about the mayor’s role in the evacuation and the buses that were left sitting. Her response: “Mayors can’t get their employees to work on a sunny day let alone during a hurricane!!!” Or something very close to that. And she repeated it several times. Is this some regional expression, or is she saying that the mayor can’t get his government employees (who are most likely black) to show up to work? It was a bizarre comment. What is she saying, I asked T. Happily, a caller on Rush’s program offered an explanation. He proposed that she was referring to New Orleans’ mass transit system. I knew where he was going with this. Either it was Mary’s original intention, or somewhere along the way she realized that what she said was going to be interpreted as a racial slam on government employees, so she started talking about how Bush has under-funded mass transit. Huh? The caller pointed out that she said “can’t get their employees to work” and that meant they are unable to physically get to their jobs because of bad mass transit systems. It’s a stretch, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. But she still dodged the questions. Next, the panel!

Brit Hume, Bill Kristol, and Juan Williams were, as Chris Wallace called it, “spirited.” It was one of the best things I’ve seen in a very long time. Unlike the confirmation hearings. I watched and listened to the long, drawn out, nonsensical speeches (they finally had to cut off Dianne Feinstein and her shoe story) just to get to Roberts’ statement. I like the baseball analogy. People don’t go to ballgames to see the umpire. He’ll call balls and strikes, but won’t be pitching and batting. I really like this guy. What a class act. Makes you wonder how he ended up in government.

I digress. About the time I was getting the tree into the ground, I heard that the lights went out in Los Angeles. T and I surfed the channels and played a game. T asked before he landed on a network: “LA, New Orleans, or Roberts?” “LA!” CNN was covering the LA blackout. So was MSNBC. So was FNC. T pointed out that it was just a blackout. I said an employee probably goofed - it wasn’t anything more nefarious than that. But the story grew. We heard the T-word. Terrorism? Oh, look! There’s a fire! Well, the reporters ran with it. T was outraged: “This is a non-story and they’re trying to make it into a terrorist attack. How can you watch this stuff?” That’s when I said: “This is the new theatre.”

Oh, and the tree. Symbolism, I know, but I like to plant trees to commemorate events. We bought the tree yesterday, intending to plant it on September 11, but it was getting late, so I decided to plant it a day later. It’s a multi-purpose tree. The previous one in that spot has been dead for a long time and has been supporting bird feeders but producing no shade. (It’s dead, you see, so there are no leaves.) We’ve thought about replacing it, and this seemed like a good time considering the recent events with the anniversary of 9/11 and the misery in the Gulf Coast.

It’s a beautiful tree. An ash. We’ve named it “Katreena.”

Whoa. Deja vu all over again. FNC pretty much reran all their September 11 coverage from 2001 this morning. Something, frankly, Americans don’t see often enough. And I watched and remembered — as if four years hadn’t passed.

I listen to the reading of the names. Italian. Irish. Spanish. Japanese. Korean. Arab. German Jew. So many countries, religions, colors, ages. But someone said the average age of the victims was thirty. Is that true?

The comparisons this week to 9/11 are wearing me down. Katrina was a natural disaster that was compounded by government incompetence and basic lack of personal responsibility. The plan called for citizens to be responsible for themselves, their families, their neighbors, their pets. Evacuate and bring food and water - enough for at least three days. If you cannot leave, we will have buses and we will escort you out of the city.

They knew the storm was coming. The skies were dark and the winds were blowing. The weatherman knew it would be catastrophic.

But on September 11, 2001 the skies were clear and so, so blue. It was a beautiful day. There was no indication that almost three thousand people would die that morning.

T is annoyed about the Katrina coverage, too. “What do they expect? It’s a catastrophe. Bad things happen during catastrophes. Things are destroyed. People are killed. That’s why it’s a catastrophe. If everything had gone smoothly, this wouldn’t have been a catastrophe. But it was. So why are they surprised that things are bad?”

Because we’re spoiled. We’ve been raised on happy endings. Most of the people who lived through the Great Depression and World Wars are dead now. Could we cope with a depression or world war? I don’t think so. We’re already squeamish about Iraq.

But today we have a video. A California native - formerly a nice Jewish boy - who converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan to train with al Qaeda. “Yesterday, London and Madrid. Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, God willing.”

God forgive me, but after two weeks of hearing from all the Sean Penns, Kirstie Alleys, and Chers, I shuddered when I heard him say Melbourne.