Uncle Sam Fucks The Dog

Without the Federal Government, roads and bridges would crumble; armed gangs would maraud the streets; children would wallow in ignorance. In other words, things would be exactly the same...

This was more or less the ad copy that caught my attention and ended up landing me my first job that wasn't in the service industry. It's basically true.

And dig it: the federal budget gets bigger every year no matter which party wins elections. If you spend 4% more when someone asked for 8% more, it's called a 50% slash in that budget item.

And what do we get? We get a military more expensive than the rest of the world's combined, and we send it to Iraq so gasoline can be even more overpriced. And we get New Orleans.

No, Uncle Sam didn't make the city below sea level, and Uncle Sam didn't make Katrina. But the Army Corps of Engineers did provide the illusion of protection, and when the levee broke, stupidity did more damage than the water.

The last evacuees, they're being forced to turn their pets loose at the bus doors because they can't take them along. What the fuck? It'll be better if we have packs of feral dogs in addition to rats and alligators when they finally drain the water and start going house to house to collect the bodies?

In Kansas City today, the Red Cross turned away a refugee who had nothing but the clothes on his back because he didn't remember his fucking ID when he fled New Orleans. And the Red Cross is generally more 'with it' than FEMA or any branch of the United States Government. So imagine how many other stupidities are being piled on down there. The mind boggles.

With one year of pre-Iraq defense spending (roughly $385,000,000,000), we could have built a hell of a levee, don't ya think? Hell, with that kind of dough, you could just bring in fill dirt (the Rocky Mountains could spare plenty I'm sure), jacked the whole city up above sea level on fill dirt. And build a system of pipelines that deliver water from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi to purification stations in the Southwest where everyone is fighting over water rights. And how were those water rights divvied up? Oh yeah, the Federal Government figured out how much for each state based on the wettest decade on record, basically promising seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny.