Dogcatcher responds:

You would not walk a mile outside of the TOURIST AREAS of New Orleans when they had a fully operating police force, so your downplaying of the crime situation there now is laughable -- and goes to show you can do the same contortions our Prez does for his many illusions. And you think they're just hitting Circuit City? Why don't you put your personal posessions out there and see how long they last with you guarding them --or for that matter how long you last. Get real or stick with the fantasy world.
--The DogCatcher


A more than fair point, DogCatcher (other than you assuming I am some sort of wuss, other than the total bad-ass that I am.) Actually looting of people's houses in inexcusable and unforgivable. My outrage on this point (which I should have clarified) is primary toward people like Sean Hannity, seeing people with nothing but the shirts on their back taking shoes from a flood-ravaged Foot Locker and asking "hypothetically" if "these people should be shot."

I will also say, as a person whose parents lost a home to a flood in 1996, and who was on hand for the recovery effort, and who also was in a flood in 1986, and part of that clean-up effort, that the devastation is inconcievable (and this was just a flood, not a hurricane.) The worst things to lose are the things like wedding photos, yearbooks, baby pictures, prom pictures. Pretty much everything else can be replaced. (Er, and pets, too. We lost a kitty in that flood, its corpse found floating in the bedroom closet.) Had what remained of our house been looted, I doubt I would have words for the sense of despair and violation I would have felt.