Let The Beatings Begin!

 

1. I saw a Discovery Channel-type show on the N.O. Police.  A prosecutor told a story about questioning a potential juror, asking him if he would take a cop’s word over that of a suspect’s.  The prosecutor had to wait for the answer while the man got over his laughing fit.

   Posted by Oink       10/10/2005  at  01:00 PM  



2. And yet, and yet ......................

   Received this from a retired Marine LtCol. friend ....................... seems SOME Canucks have an appreciation of “US”!

   ~~~~~

   Subject: Canadian article
   
   Canadian Press On Bush

   A bit more objectivity than we get from our own press and politicians.

   David Warren.The Ottawa Citizen

   Sunday, September 11, 2005

   There’s plenty wrong with America, since you asked.  I’m tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course—I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.

   But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn’t even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you’re in real trouble, that’s where the adults live.

   And that isn’t an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard.  Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russell
   Honore, it was once again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

   We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don’t have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big
   scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

   >From Democrats and the American Left—the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada—we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

   This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and government support through many other programs. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses that could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.

   Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many
   died, and one’s heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

   The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I’ll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming
   disproportionately from people who vote Republican.  For the world divides into “the mouths” and “the wallets.”

   The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers’ state of mind.

   Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and you will learn that the U.S. federal government’s legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.

   Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days in advance of the storm fall. In the little time since, he has managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation—the largest in human history—without invoking martial powers. He has been
   sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.

   One thinks of Kipling’s poem If, which I learned to recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy—as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:

   If you can keep your head when all about you

   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

   If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

   But make allowance for their doubting too;

   If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

   Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

   Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise,

   Then you are a man, my son.

   Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.

   Posted by Diamond Mair       10/10/2005  at  01:02 PM  



3. Excellent post Diamond M. !! The original can be found right here. Impressive!

   Because this story is sourced from CNN, my bullshit meter was set on High while reading it. Interesting that “About 300 officers apparently either died”. Oh yeah? Name them. Hell, name 5 of them.  Well, 5 that weren’t killed in traffic accidents while fleeing the scene in stolen Cadillacs. Also, I so totally feel their pain: “officers now have beds on a cruise ship — but they don’t have private rooms”. Oh just STFU.

   And now we see a drunk getting beat down. Geez. I’m sure there has never been any public drunkeness on Bourbon St before. Looks to me like the old guard is back to their old crap once again. Fire these bastards and jail them all.

   Posted by Drew458       10/10/2005  at  01:33 PM  



4. I saw the tape. The cop on horseback sure tried to block the camera shot with the horse’s quarters but you could see a cop pummeling the subject. It didn’t get any prettier as time went on. I see this as a mini Rodney king incident. (oh, crap, capital k just crapped out on me. That’s serious for me. Remember my name.)

   Posted by StinKerr       10/10/2005  at  01:44 PM  



5. Good job all the above.  The corruption was so bad in N.O. that The Feds ran a sting on the cops, hiring police to guard a “drug filled warehouse” and supplying the suckers with cell-phones (tapped? you bet!). They recorded messages wherein the cops were plotting to kill the “drug dealers” and steal the dope.

   Posted by Oink       10/10/2005  at  03:34 PM  



6. I agree with you Stin..........have seen this over & over again on CNN the past few days.......I think this is too much brutality for a simple public intoxication.........

   Posted by Dottie       10/10/2005  at  10:11 PM  

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