Not THAT again!

Billmon is getting just a little . . well, you know. . . shrill!
Dead or Alive:

If you think about it, it's probably just as well that Katrina wasn't a terrorist. Because if she was, she'd probably still be hiding out in the North Atlantic, periodically smuggling out bombastic videotapes ('Death to puny mammals and their infidel cave hives!') and occasionally sending violent thunderstorms to blow down train stations and beach resorts outside the United States. And then the Cheney administration would have to go find some other tropical storm -- somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably -- to declare war on. And that would trigger a long, tedious debate about whether the Indian Ocean had anything to do with the flooding of New Orleans, or whether Cyclone Saddam (or whatever) was secretly storing up lighting bolts in the Bay of Bengal for a sneak attack that would electrocute millions of Americans in their sleep. . . Then Dick Cheney would have to go on Meet the Press and promise Tim Russert that Operation Cyclone Liberation would be a piece of cake, because the waves in the Indian Ocean would greet us as liberators, allowing our troops to walk on water . . . .Then the boys at the National Security Council would have to draft a whole new national security strategy, claiming an exclusive U.S. right to preemptively invade any ocean that might conceivably produce a Category 3 or above hurricane, and convert it into a peaceful, ripple-free lake of democratic capitalism. Then Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton would have to line up and explain that they, too, are in favor of invading every ocean in the world -- but only if Bush agrees to quadruple the size of the U.S. Navy and equip every Marine with an armored aqualung. And Tom Friedman would have to write a column for the New York Times arguing that it is both possible and desirable to create peaceful, pro-Western cyclones that will accept Israel's right to exist, because the oceans are flat. But worst of all, we'd have to listen to Shrub strut and shout about how he's going to "smoke Katrina out of her seahole," and "bring the evildoer to justice" -- only to turn around a few months later and explain that he isn't really concerned about hurricanes any more, now that the entire U.S. miltary is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean . . . Then Kerry would get pissy and demand that Bush dump even more troops into the Indian Ocean, and Bush would get even more defensive, and babble some feeble lie about how he relies on his generals to tell him how many troops they need to dump into the Indian Ocean in order to make sure we fight the cyclones there instead of in New Orleans. And then media would bend itself over backwards pretending that Shrub actually has a freaking clue about what's going on outside his own head. We've already been through that kind of insanity once, and I don't think anyone -- least of all Bush -- wants to go through it again. So I guess we should be relieved that Katrina was just a storm. Hurricanes we can deal with, sort of. But a Global War Against Hurricanes (or, alternatively, a Struggle Against Weather Extremism) could easily be our national undoing.