Friday, September 02, 2005
STATE OF MADNESS
Tom Kaade was one of the heroes of September 11:
Kaade lives in South Bend, Indiana. When the WTC was attacked, Kaade and his friends Ron and Wayne drove a Dodge pickup to Ground Zero, where the trio loaded the truck with ice and bottles. “Help yourself to a drink, sir,” Kaade called out to every cop, ambulance staffer or fireman who wandered past.
At some stages they were giving away 640 bottles of water and soft drink every hour, while Kaade glared at the rescue site, quietly furious there was nothing more he could do.
I don’t know if Kaade voted for Bush or Gore in the 2000 election; meeting him in the circumstances described above, after he and his friends had driven 600 miles to buy all those drinks for rescue workers, it didn’t seem significant. It still doesn’t ... except when you consider that Kaade is from a red state, and you read something like this, by California’s Joseph Cannon:
My original reaction to the Katrina catastrophe was going to be: “NOT ONE DIME.”
For an hour or so, I contemplated the idea of turning it into a crusade: No-one in the blue states (where the money is) should give one dime of aid to the victims of this hurricane, which devastated Bush-friendly regions ...
So why was I thinking of starting a movement against giving aid to the stricken areas?
Because these are red states. They voted for Bush. These ninnies obviously wanted these policies, and they deserve to live with the consequences of their votes.
A large part of me still believes that many of these W-worshipping numbskulls deserve to suffer and to die. They brought it on themselves. Let them look to Jayzuss for aid: It’s time they stopped leeching off the more productive blue staters ...
So, at least, I started to write. But then (to paraphrase the old song) I thought I’d better think it out again.
Many of the victims, the ones who have suffered the most, are poor. The hardest hit were the blue state folk living among the red state maniacs. New Orleans, we should note, went heavily for Kerry.
And that’s why we must help. Although it was very tempting to say otherwise.
If they were all Bush voters, however ... have fun dying! Cannon echoes Michael Moore, who wrote on September 12, 2001:
They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California—these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush.
When the Bush-loathing pathogen is so active that reaction to 9/11 or Katrina first focuses on who the victims may have voted for, well, for these people there is no hope. One anti-Bush reader of Cannon’s piece maintains perspective:
You, sir, are a scumbag. People in the heartland LINED UP to help New Yorkers after 9/11, regardless of the fact that most heartlanders have ALWAYS viewed NYC with distrust and disdain. People in the heartland LINE UP to help when California is ravaged by earthquakes, or mudslides, or wildfires, or…regardless of the fact that many heartlanders view California as LaLa Land, Where Anything Goes.
People like you are the reason Democrats will CONTINUE to lose elections. As much as I loathe Geo. Bush (for this war in Iraq, for failing to secure our borders, for doing nothing as our manufacturing base erodes still further) I was happy to see him win last year’s election only because I knew people like you were John Kerry supporters. Slime.
(Via LGF)