prematurely grey

There are days when even I can understand why Sarah Palin believes she’s qualified to be vice president. They come when I foresee a situation and think of strategies for dealing with it, even though the situation remains hypothetical. Some people call this process “planning.”

Today, Aftermath Ike hit Texas. And part of me wanted to scream, “Jesus, why don’t you put me in charge of FEMA? I would have gotten those fucking trucks full of assets out of Fort Worth and San Antonio. I would have said, “Hey, drive on the feeder roads once you get to the 610 Loop, because anyone who’s ever been to Houston knows the highways flood. It’s not rocket science to drive those truck from San Antonio.”

Here’s the deal: journalists are pissed because they haven’t been allowed to observe the Bolivar (pronounced Boll-i-ver) Peninsula. This is where the worst of the worst took place. And who doesn’t have a good answer for why no one’s been allowed in? That’s right. Our very own Governor Good Hair, Mr. 39% himself.

Then there’s the finger pointing. FEMA says the state was supposed to distribute the assets. Texas says FEMA was supposed to do it. Then somebody (I can’t keep this straight) says, “No, the local governments are supposed to do this?” WHAH? The local governments are supposed to handle getting the ice and water and MREs to their dazed citizens, the ones who didn’t leave and didn’t, for whatever reason, get themselves a 72 hour supply of food and water?˜ Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.

There are different ways of telling every story, I suppose. Looking through the Houston Chronicle blog, lots of grocery stores are opening up (with limited supplies), 500,000 people have power now, and you could drive on the highway downtown. (But why would you want to go there? The streets are littered with glass.) Latest update–four Starbucks are open. (Any idea how 4 Starbucks are going to handle 2 million people?) Apparently, the American way of life will continue in Houston.

But Aftermath Ike is here for a while in Galveston and Orange and Port Arthur. And part of recovering from the recovery will be talking about performance of officials like Rick Perry who call the people who didn’t evacuate “knuckleheads.”

Shit! After all the reading and watching and thinking, I can’t find the heartbreaking quote, the one that would damn Rick Perry to an even hotter hell than the one he’s headed for. It was an interview with a woman who stayed behind, one of the non-evacuating knuckleheads. And why didn’t she evacuate? She’d already spent all her money evacuating her family for Gustav. She couldn’t afford to evacuate. There are other reasons people don’t evacuate, some of them pretty pathetic. But to lump all of these people, these dazed and devastated people, together as knuckleheaded, well, I really am shocked that Perry didn’t get the VP nod. Guess you can’t put lipstick on a pig..