Who is this Andrew Sullivan of which Jeff speaks. I seem to recall such a name, but that was long ago, before his vacation in the Hamptons.

Steve, it's not that FEMA wouldn't give up space in their vehicles to reporters, it's that ALL press was being turned away. Saw it with my own two eyes.

I couldn't resist, I had to pop in the Holy Grail DVD and watch it. Does that make me a bad person?

"I'm not dead yet!"

I'm rather disgusted with the media, so I'll be blunt. I suggest they just want to play CSI:New Orleans now that the contestents on Survivor:New Orleans have left the island that was the Superdome.

They report the death toll in Mississippi as a flat whole number, but in NOLA they want to film each corpse so they can do the another bodybag for Bush running total.

I wonder how many DU heads will simply explode from frustration if the Katrina death toll comes in not only below 9/11, but also below the number of service men and women killed in Iraq.

Good point Lynxx. Why is the media focusing on New Orleans, and the problems there, and virtually ignoring Mississippi and Alabama? Sure, the disaster in NO is sexier, but if things are going well in the other spots, why not show that the state and federal governments are doing well there. Oh, that's right, it might show Republicans doing good.

This is good stuff. JG has hit this right on the nubbins.

Of course, we'll never have an accurate account of the dead, since according to ole Randall over at Huffpo, the victims ate their dead neighbors...

Maybe we can get the Lancet in to do a study?

And gee, both of those posts should have been in the thread above. Crap.

Feel free to delete if desire, SG

I dunno - I think my favorite "dumb press moment" was when Geraldo started to realize how deep in it he'd stepped, and was nearly screaming about the people with little babies that had been out there for "SIX DAYS!"

This, of course, was on Friday evening after the storm, which would mean that it had been four days at most.

If there's a message I get from this piece it's that Sully doesn't belong in the Conservative movement because he's a big flaming fag. You can tell how important it is to the author because he states it right up front in the first sentence. After that it doesn't pass for reaasoned discourse.

What to go, Undertoad, you've demonstrated that you have zero reading comprehension whatsoever.

Public school system, right?

Undertoad - a little historical perspective may be in order . . . you can't intelligently discuss Sullivan unless you read him regularly before and after Bush came out (so to speak) for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Sullivan being gay has nothing to do with whether we conservatives wish to have him in the movement (we were happy to have him before, and it wasn't exactly a secret that he was gay), but sadly it appears to have everything to do with why he left, and the animosity derived from that one issue continues to infect his coverage of other unrelated issues.

I've read the guy since he began, roughly, and I continue to read him today. What you see is not animosity; to call it animosity is unfair. It's a fundamental change in school of thought.

Forget for a moment who is right and who is wrong, who is left or who is right.

When one is still in a school of thought, a Sully-like departure looks like animosity or betrayal or confusion. From the other side, it looks like enlightenment, discovery, reason.

But from the point of view of the departing, it is only transition.

Look at it from Sully's POV. The right has basically won an election by defining him and his loved one as second-class citizens. Forget about WHY, forget about the whole gay argument. Imagine instead that your school of thought defined YOU as a second-class citizen because of some very basic part of who you are. Lutheran, brown-eyed, separate ear-lobed, whatever.

Might that not affect your thinking when they make similar definitive statements about other issues? In fact, how COULD it not? Damn, you would HAVE to say, they were SO wrong on that issue, something that is such a part of me that it defines me... maybe they are wrong about X or Y or Z as well.

Crank, you can say "Gosh we conservatives LIKE gay people" but you can't even SEE protein wisdom making sure it's a part of the discussion right off the bat. "Just in case we forgot, Sully posts about his sex life and we can make fun of it." Well, if you really want gays to join your school of thought you better be the first to call protein wisdom on that kind of crap.

That's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.

[Apparently Required Disclaimers: I am not gay, I am not liberal, and although I attended a very high-quality public school, I redeemed myself by graduating from a private, highly competitive liberal arts college in the northeast. I then did post-grad work at a major private Jesuit university.]

So Undertoad, your opinion is the product not merely of a lack of reading comprehension but a misrepresentation of past events as well.

That changes everything.

Is that, like, the best you can do or something?

Why would you assume mentioning Sullivan's gay lifestyle is a slam on said lifestyle? It simply is. If I slammed anything, it was Sullivan's conservative bona fides. Personally, I'd rather somebody link to a post about my sexual proclivities (written by me) than to compare ME to Josh Marshall. Besides, Sullivan's sexuality is hardly a secret.

Perhaps I should treat him as part of a protected subgroup? -- and in so doing, treat him differently than I do others on my site?

After all, being gay is a disability and isn't mentioned in good company, yes?