"The last twelve hours of news coverage has been nearly overwhelming. Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn, others, even unapologetic partisans like Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson (at MSNBC) -- everyone is asking where the government is. (No, I haven't turned to Fox News. I don't have the heart, today.)
Anderson Cooper lost it interviewing Sen. Mary Landrieu, countering her litany of thank-yous to a series of politicians with his own encounter with rats eating a body that had been left abandoned in the street for 48 hours.
Paula Zahn boggled at FEMA director Michael Brown's declaration that the reason about 15,000 shelter seekers at the New Orleans Convention Center have gone without food or water since the day of the hurricane is because FEMA didn't even know the refugees were there until today."
As I write this at 9:15 AM EST, Miles O'Brien is reporting live from the Kenner, Lousiana airport lobby jammed with sick, exhausted American refugees. Dr. Sanjay Gupta is reporting via live audio feed from Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where patients are dying, newborn babies are missing and doctors are desperate to help refugees. And Anderson Cooper is smack in the middle of New Orleans, reporting from the heart of the debacle, as he is wont to do in disasters.
CNN is making this contemptible crumbling of US infrastructures real for all of us. We can't hide from the hard facts on our TVs: our federal government has miserably failed us.
Concludes Hunter at DailyKos, "We have witnessed two disasters this week. The first was an act of nature. The second was not. The second disaster, still ongoing, is unforgivable.
That's the only word that comes to mind, a word I keep repeating to myself. These deaths, these men, these women, these infants dying now in these hours didn't have to happen. They did not have to die waiting for convoys to gather outside their city or for reservists to stand alongside their shattered police forces. They did not have to wait in darkness and fear for help to arrive, only to struggle for days without that help ever coming.
This is not politics. This is not partisanship.This is unforgivable."
Is this America or is this some poverty-stricken Third World country? This is clearly not the America we learned of in school and from our parents.
This is no longer America of even five years ago.
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