D.Weinberger at JOHO asks:
Joho the Blog: Forced compassion
And why the hell did it take pressure to get Bush to begin to do the right thing? It took Bush three days to announce the $35M. He is addressing this catastrophe through press releases. What does it take to make George W. Bush’s heart hurt?
Sadly, I ‘m afraid that political pressure is the only thing to “touch his heart”, becuase that’s where his “compassion” seems to be live. The upping of the ante in response to pressure bears that out. It’s disgraceful, and another example of the absolute naivete that the Christian Right continues to maintain about Bush’s “Christian leanings”, and how his shallow mentionings and outright mispplications of Biblical verses (eg. His referring to the American people as the “Light that shines in the darkness”)
That the 350 million is less than a day in Iraq illuminates the obvious, and calls into direct question the Iraq operations that inflict an ongoing and devastating death toll, not to even mention in the smae breath the enduring scars that will reap reflective violence in the years to come.
I only wish the stupid media would correctly report that the initial amount to be promised for aid was $15M, not the $35M that they keep reporting. I hate the media.
Weinberger did lead up to that paragraph I quoted with this:
Good. That’s up a lot from the ludicrous $4M we offered five days ago, the boost to a shameful $15M, and the upping of that to the merely disgraceful $35M. It’s still not nearly enough from a country that claims to be the world’s economic, military and moral leader; before the election, Congress allotted $13.6 billion to rebuild states after the horrendous hurricane season. I understand that no other countries were contributing to the Help Florida fund, and that countries have a first responsibility to their own, but how about a little proportionality here?
You may have gone there and seen the whole context, but I wanted to be sure you saw that. Weinberger is one of my “blog parents”, as he and the Cluetrain guys (Christopher Locke and Doc Searls) are responsible for my initial forray into blogging. I also heard Weinberger along with AKMA at Vanderbilt here last May speak on Blogging in the University Setting. Aside from the Cluetrain Manifesto, Weinberger was the sole author of “Small Pieces , Loosely Joined”, which is a good and fascinating exploration of how the Web changes relationships for the positive. (YOU, Eric, may know all this already, but hey , this is a blog, so it might educate SOMEBODY in the process)
Ah, cool. Now I feel like I dork, but I wasn’t really talking about him. I’ve seen Atrios and others link to pieces in major media publications that keep getting it wrong.
Speaking of blogging, my pastor wants me to set up a blog for him pretty soon, so that makes me pretty excited 🙂