Fear & Loathing In New Orleans

Fear & Loathing In New Orleans

They were somewhere around Baton Rouge, on the edge of the swamp…

…hey, wait a second, that’s not how it goes.

But it could, if good old Mayor Ray Nagin gets his way. See, his long-suffering police force is really stressed out. You know, the ones abandoning their posts, looting, etc. To reward them, he’s giving many of them (as well as firefighters and EMTs) five-day vacations to Las Vegas. Effective immediately. As in, today.

I’ll pause while the sheer intellectual weight of that comes to bear on your astonished mind.

It’s all right here, in black and white. Yes, the good Mayor says they’ve been under a lot of stress in the last week, so he wants to ‘cater to them.’ He says there are enough national guard units now that they can take a break.

While I don’t want to malign those civil servants who actually did their jobs in the last week, I think that may be the most repugnant thing I’ve ever read. It’s been a week. One week. Seven days. These men were asked to do their jobs, and only their jobs, under extreme duress for one week, and a big portion of them couldn’t even manage to do that. Current reports have over 500 (that’s something like 1/3) walking off the job. We have the chief of police complaining they had to work in wet shoes, and without proper bathroom facilities.

That chief had this to say on the subject of the trips:

‘His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process."
The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.
They said that they were trying to get the first officers on their way on Monday and that the first stop would be Baton Rouge, about 75 miles from here.’

Jump-start the healing process. Well, it’s good to know the fine city of New Orleans is in such capable hands. I think it’s important that a chief of police knows that his job when his city is in complete civil unrest and a total state of destruction is to make certain his law officers are well rested and ‘healed’ from their trauma.

He’s so sure of this plan, he plans to take a vacation as well! So does the head of Homeland Security for the city, the man in charge of the recovery effort. Check this out, and I defy you to do it without gagging on a sudden rise of bile.

‘Colonel Ebbert, the senior official running the recovery and rescue operation, and Mr. Compass both said that they planned to take a break as well, but probably for less than five days, and that they would continue to direct the recovery by telephone.
Officials said they expected the military, with much greater resources, to expand rescue work, begin cleaning up the city and take the first steps toward reconstruction.’

Well, it’s good to know they won’t take the whole five days. I mean, after all, they’re just leading the rescue and recovery effort of their entire city, I hope that only three or four days of rest and relaxation in Las Vegas will jump-start their personal healing process. We can’t have our vital civic leaders stressed out or unrested! No sir!

Of course, all of this shores up every single thing I’ve been saying. They make it clear with their own words: they fully expect the feds to do EVERYTHING. The military will do the rescue and recovery, they will begin cleaning the city, they’ll police the city, they’ll fight fires and perform medical response service, they’ll even start the reconstruction!

I think the good Mr. Nagin should be forced to spend his five day vacation in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool (name stolen from the brilliant Bill Whittle), personally cleaning and restoring every single one of the reportedly 400-500 busses he failed to use to evacuate his own people, enough to EMPTY the Superdome before it became the Thunderdome minus Mad Max and Tina Turner.

I tell you, my friends, I hope the officials and civil servants of New Orleans enjoy their vacation. As they keep hanging themselves in the press, the word will eventually leak out despite the mainstream media’s attempts to completely ignore their culpability and instead pursue the ‘everything is Bush’s fault’ line of hogwash. Once that word is out there, Ma and Pa Kettle in flyover country will be joined by John and Jackie Liberal in Manhattan as they wholeheartedly cry for the heads of these men to be posted on the outskirts of the city on long poles, as a warning to the others.