After a slew of debates between Landrieu and Nagin, we finally get to the heart of the matter. Chris Rose has a 60 second interview with each candidate and it’s very revealing. The last question ices it for me:
There’s another flood. You are in a rescue boat. You arrive at a rooftop to find Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. There’s only room for one in the boat. Who do you take?
Landrieu: They both get left.
Nagin: I give them the boat and get on the roof and wait for the helicopter.
The choice is even more obvious now, isn’t it? Ray Nagin thinks he’s clever because he has a way to rescue Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. How lame is that? And how lame would it be to let someone with such absurdly poor judgment run this crippled city?
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The great thing about New Orleans is that there are people there who can see past all the politics, the mud and nitty grittys and persevere. Its always been a city of indiviuals who choose to be very apolitical – until someone crosses over the line. Remember “Better a Lizard than a Wizard?”
I have been for Landrieu, but his interview is total politician bullshit. At least Nagin answered the questions honestly, without spin. Whether this is a smart approach remains to be seen.
The comment from Nameless is pretty accurate.
Actually, that’s kind of my feelings for American democracy in general. I think we’d do better if we had democracy by lottery. You know, you draw the short straw, you gotta be mayor for a month. At least then we’d establish our systems such that any old idiot that comes into office can’t make too much of a mess of things.
I don’t know, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of this country and, as sad as it is, this is the only place where anyone really knows what a community is. Everywhere else we paved over them to make comfortable suburbs and hives for Yuppie spawn. Maybe communities thrive in the face of adversity. Nameless is right, it still doesn’t feel like progress. But then, I don’t think moving anywhere else in the US will be. I know I sure as Hell won’t be happy there.
But I think that’s part of our problem, not just here but America in general. We endow our systems with all this power, expecting them to fix things for us and then we let any old fucktard with a petition and a couple Benjamins run the show. I mean, now we have our city wallowing in the neglect of generations of willful government malfeasance and a federal administration with no better exit plan than the Book of Revelations. We have to take back what we have given and the only way to do that is keep on the way we’ve been. Tell them that no matter how good they think they are, we only picked them because the other guy is a bigger asshole, and we run the show. We need to make sure that things work the way we want them to.
All this does is prove that if you ask a dumb question, you get a dumb answer. At least Landrieu punted.
Hope that the citizens of N.O. are smarter than such a degraded political discourse.
At the risk of seeming flippant, how can one talk about moral dilemmas when the hypothetical involves rescuing rich-daddy’s-girl celebritites? Mitch gave the crisp answer: a politely dismissive one. Nagin tried to inject cleverness into a silly question. We don’t have time to overanalyze ridiculous questions. In New Orleans we have to allocate resources efficiently, and I don’t think Nagin has the proper kind of mind to address the difficult questions we are facing in this city. Nagin’s answer to the silly question is revealing, and not in a positive way.