The Anchoress

What good, good news. Thank God and praise Him from whom all blessings flow!

Rita, while powerful, spared Galveston and Houston, and essentially spent most of her fury in “extreme southwest Louisiana, a lightly populated area just east of Sabine Pass, Texas, according to the National Hurricane Center”

She is already a simple 50mph Tropical Storm at this writing. Whew!

Of course, there was still lots of destruction and downed powerlines, and buildings and homes lost, and more flooding in Louisiana, unfortunately. But the chaos to life and limb seems minimal at this report, and the potentially great devastation seems to have been avoided. We’ll know more, later, of course.

I saw the headline on Drudge and the photo of Bush shaking hands with folks at the command center. I expect we will soon hear from predictable quarters that “Rita wasn’t that devastating because Bush got involved, because it was about the rich white folks in Texas and not the poor folks in Louisiana. If he’d been this engaged, New Orleans (which actually “had” dodged a bullet at first) would never have flooded. Because…somehow..Bush’s presence would have strengthened the levees.

Oh, look. I no sooner wrote those words, than someone sent me this.

Darn that elitist Rita - she spared the rich folks in Houston and ruined many small towns in Louisiana. And guess whose fault it is? Nah, don’t bother…

Sensible people will note a few things: the state and local authorities in Texas had an emergency plan in place which they USED and they began taking every precaution early in the game. Sensible people will recall that the un-sensible Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, had to, once again, more or less be FORCED to order an evacuation of his city which - oh, by the way - FLOODED AGAIN, even though as far as we can tell, President Bush was not setting off bombs at the levees or ignoring people hoping they would die.

Sensible people will understand that Rita moved and weakened, and much was spared, and they will thankful and full of praise.

Others will simply try to use the storm to foment more of whatever their agenda needs.

The DC March seemed, also, to be considerably less than reports and Phil Donoghue had promised. While some said it would “the largest such gathering since the beginning of the Iraq war,” etc, it seems the protestors were the usual A.N.S.W.E.R. folks - the same folks who come out for every “big” protest - the ones who have marched almost every year since President Bush came into office. And the co-ordination with London, SanFrancisco, et al, seemed much less impressive than it was in, say, 2003 when there really were “many hundreds of thousands” taking to the streets.

I keep thinking of those women with purple fingers, raised in victory. Imagine protesting that.

The one time I bothered to flick on the TV and look for coverage it sure didn’t look like 100,000 people to me…but then, tv always adds ten pounds.

That non-sequiter was as appropriate to the occasion as anything I heard while I was tuned in.

Maxed Out Mama has a really good post wherein she links to many and also quotes some DU’ers who are convinced that the (apparently now rabidly rightwing) C-Span coverage “is not showing the people! It looks like a po-dunky picnic…”

Why yes…po-dunky picnic is precisely what it looked like to me, too. I am quite sure that if a gargantuan crowd had assembled, someone, somewhere, in some news agency, would have the picture. Haven’t seen it yet. This ain’t it.

I did see someone on the stage prattling about what a great guy Hugo Chavez was, so it seems that no matter what some will say, this “anti-war” rally was your basic gathering of Socialists and Communists, doing their usual gathering things, but with a super-intensive Bush-hatred theme. We are super-intensely hating George W. Bush. And we’re smarter than everyone else on the planet. Greener, more aware, more alert, more engaged, more sympathetic, more compassionate, more noble and better-informed than the rest of the world, too. Daddy’s gonna pay for my crashed car.

I believe Joan Baez is singing tonight - we’ve never seen that before.

I expect that the less-than-monumental turnout will be spun as a compassionate response to Hurricane Rita - that with so much devastation happening down in Texas, too many who would have marched did not do so out of consideration for the people struggling with the storm.

They’re going to have to say something, because in the past A.N.S.W.E.R. has been able to rally together many more than they have this day…and they ARE supposed to be riding a wave of anti-war momentum right now…aren’t they?

There’s lots of coverage on the blogs - much moreso, it seems, than on the television, where reporters seem strangely downcast. I think they were expecting much more drama out of both Rita and the DC crowds.

In the blogosphere, check out Michelle Malkin’s pictures and fisking. Oxblog reads the A.N.S.W.E.R. literature so you don’t have to. Gateway Pundit has quite a roundup and pictures. Ann Althouse, in lawyerly fashion, nails the press’ testimony and utterly discredits them. Confederate Yankee, trying to nail down the crowd size finds wild exaggerations that 300,000 attended and a blog report of a “massive turnout,” but when it comes down to it, “tens of thousands” does seem to be the number honest media are comfortable reporting. Sigmund has some thoughts on spin.

That’s an anti-war protest, in fine weather, riding a “wave of anti-Bush, anti-war momentum.” Somehow, I just can’t get impressed, you know?

Btw…

Prayer works!

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein is wondering about how booklovers were figured into this equation. Baldilocks has pictures from the LA protest. Some really deplorably stupid signs. Chris Christner has great pictures of dumb signs and some really appalling dialogue excerpts, that you just have to read to believe. More pictures here.