I read this comment a day or two ago and I couldn’t help comparing it to Scarlet O’Hara claiming that the darkies were happy on the plantation and that they needed white folks to take care of them.
A rolleyes just doesn’t do Barbara Bush justice, you know?
But hey, when you live in such a rarefied atmosphere as does Babs, reality is nothing more than a nagging detail you can shut out when the driver clinks shut the door to your limo.
Yeah Babs, I can see how all the Katrina victims are really going to cash in on this. Works out well for them, doesn’t it? :rolleyes: Yes, the “underprivileged” love a good natural disaster to improve their lives.
So much so, that disasters of this caliber should be part of twelve step programs, no? Or how about as an addition to those from welfare to workfare programs?
Heh. God, I’m sick.
Her remarks were insensitive and profoundly thoughtless.
And if people are in such bad shape that losing all they own in a hurricane is actually a good thing, perhaps she ought to ask her husband and son why they let things get so bad in the first place.
It just depresses the hell out of me to think that such a fucking heartless, cynical, vindictive twat like her has so much power. I’m going to dance the day that she dies. And I’m going to laugh really, really hard when O’Reilly sheds a little fake Visine tear on his little reality-bending game show. Fuck her.
On her tour of the area (or wherever she went) she stated that things aren’t being mishandled. It’s just that the media keeps showing pictures of the same areas all the time, and that things are going pretty well, actually. What a moron.
Are any of them NOT heartless, cynical, vindictive twats? Honestly, ANY single one of them?
I realize that I’m pretty cynical saying so (and I recognize that a couple of people like McCain and Colin Powell seem to have kept their souls), but goddammit, it’s almost like no matter who I vote for, they’ll turn out to be a flesheating disease on the skin of America. I know a couple of local aldermen/women, so I know they’re in it to actually do good things and do them the right way.
But this whole fucking mess is another example of the flim-flam, wool-over-the-eyes, pass-the-buck-an’-don’t-blame-me, where’s-mary-magdelene-and-a-cheeseburger BULLSHIT that is the unholy and contemptible mess we call leadership.
Maybe if I were rich I’d at least get a goddamn taxcut, because that would make me feel a whole lot better about everything.
Og knows (or if he doesn’t, the folks here at SDMB do) that I don’t have a whole lot of good things to say about the Bush family. But I doubt that any of them is personally disdainful or indifferent toward poor people in general.
The thing seems to be that they’re all just totally tone-deaf when it comes to talking about socioeconomic class, esp. about poor people. It sticks out a mile that they simply think of the wealthy as the social norm, and the working class (esp. the urban working class) as a sort of quaint little backwards tribe from Gujarat or Mars or somewhere.
They’ve all said boneheaded stuff like this, apparently oblivious to how clueless and elitist it makes them look. Remember Bush I campaigning in Iowa in 1987, when he speculatively explained the poor turnout of his supporters at a Republican primary candidates’ rally? “A lot of people that support me, they were off at the air show, they were at their daughters’ coming out parties, or teeing up at the golf course for that all-important last round.” Right, that’s the way to position yourself as a true voters’ candidate with broad popular appeal: suggest that a large bloc of your supporters throw debutante cotillions for their daughters, for Og’s sake. What percentage of Iowa voters, even among Republicans, have ever even seen a debutantes’ coming-out party?
And then there’s Bush II, joking about how his “elite” political base consists of “the haves and the have-mores.” And offering up as a candidate for sympathy in the post-Katrina devastation Senator Trent Lott, whose Louisiana beach house was destroyed—“He’s lost his entire house”. Gee, that really brings home the human tragedy of it all, don’t it?
Now we get Ex-First-Lady Bar chirping that a devastating natural disaster wiping out homes and other assets is working out pretty well for the refugees, because “they were underprivileged anyway”.
Just more elitist burbling from inside the Bush Bubble. No, I honestly don’t think that any of them is genuinely heartless. They simply do not have a fucking clue what it’s actually like not to be rich. In other words, the percentage of the population that’s actually real to them is the 10–20% who can afford beach houses and attend debutante cotillions and make up the “haves” and the “have-mores”. Is it any wonder that these are the people they’re running the country for?
Mildly disappointed you left out my personal favorite, the elders Bush’s wonder and amazment at the high technology of the grocery check out lane. 'Cause he was unfamiliar with the exotic ritual we call “buying the goddam groceries”.