Attytood gives us this little lesson, via Eschaton:
We heard this on CNN (on satellite radio) last night while we were driving home and almost ran off the road. It was an exchange between anchor Aaron Brown and Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent, about the military seeking to explain it's slow response to Katrina:
MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn't move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.
And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.
And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn't really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.
Jesus wept on hearing that one. I kicked the garage door in, again. When you show me the bureaucrat who has not had food or water for five days, who is living in a congested sports arena or on the street, among feces and corpses, who is watching infants and the elderly die and hearing gunshots in the distance, then I will have as much understanding for the bureaucrats as I have for the plight of the victims.
This has been the most fucking demonstration of incompetency I have ever observed in my life. What are the qualifications of the Bush appointed head of FEMA? Is it true that he used to be an estate lawyer?
Do you feel that the government can cope with a major terrorist attack after watching the events of the last five days unfold? Gah.
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Added: This must be the best demonstration of what is wrong with the new media fashion of deciding that neutrality from the media requires giving each viewpoint equal weight, as in the idea that "Opinions on the Shape of the Earth Vary", as if there are no objective criteria to decide on anything. I thought that relativism was something extreme lefties are accused of? It doesn't take a long discussion to decide that job stresses of the bureaucrats are not equal causes for concern with people quite possibly dying from the effects of hurricane, lawlessness and government ineptitude.