Katrina Recovery: Couched in Military Terms. Its all Military. Military.

Listening to teevee all day, every day since this started, I am really quite concerned about the increasingly military sounds that seems to be in the air.

A New Orleans police lieutenant talking about restoring order in the city: 'We will take back the city.' 'We're up to the mission.'

Chertoff to Fat Timmy Russert on MTP just today: 'There will be plenty of time for after action reports.'

Everyone, it seems: 'Refugees.'

We don't have rescues, we have medevacs.

There aren't any helicopters or 'copters. No. There are 'choppers' and 'blackhawks'.

Even the visuals.

That now-famous picture of the NOPD officers, dressed in black and armed to the teeth, riding atop some sort of S.W.A.T vehicle, rifles at the ready, rolling past Creole women holding little babies.

People being put onto, and then taken off of, busses and having to walk a gauntlet of armed 'troops'.

First Marine Expeditionary Force

Northern Command

General Thisone and General Thatone.

Rumsfeld on the ground in New Orleans.

Military.

I am simply sickened by all this. I know its a rescue, but for the love of God, why can't we make it LOOK like a rescue?

That question was rhetorical. I know why. Because it plays well to have tough guys with guns 'taking back the city'. That's a shitload more dramatic than some cop helping to deliver a poor, elderly, infirmed black woman's insulin.

I can only imagine how much better this would look to me if someone who CARED were our President.

My heart has been aching for a week now. Will it end? Will I ever again be able to feel genuinely good about my country?

Not in the traditional sense, not yet, but military laingo has been creepin gin for years. War on terror, war on poverty, war on this and that.
And these are just obvious examples.

any chance the dems will refuse to use this language?

everything looks like a nail"?

The only tool BushCo can conceive of using is a brute force military. So everyone not-BushCo looks like an insurgent.

I hate these people.