First Lady Princess Leia on Hurricane Katrina, Says the planet of Alderaan Will Increase Aid

First Lady Laura Bush has taught me to laugh again.

She has given me the joy of laughter, and not the terrified laughter of an American who looks at the escalating deficit in horror, not the panicked, insane laughter of a man watching the latest news reports of the war in Iraq, but the derisive laughter of condescension.

While she is an exponentially superior public speaker than our current president… she’s only married to him. She has no authority to address the American public on anything. She was not voted into office, she just happens to be married to someone who was (or at least according to Supreme Court Justice Scalia). And yet, yesterday, it was delegated on to her, the responsibility of addressing the world about the horrific cyclone in Myanmar, -which the First Lady still refers to as Burma in a passive aggressive but transparent effort to drive home the US’s opposition to the military government that has seized power there.Yesterday’s address by the First Lady offered us all a wonderful look into the Bush administration's stunning hypocrisies and failures as they outlined how they would now help the victims of a cyclone, -which is really a species of hurricane.

It requires a particularly selective type of amnesia to talk about a cyclone in an Asian country, while there are people in your own country still suffering from Katrina’s historic devastation and your own husband’s unprecedented ineptitude. So, I thought it would be interesting to take the transcript of First Lady’s speech, and simply substitute the words: “Laura Bush”, “Burma” and “the United States” for: “Princess Leia”, “New Olreans/Lousiana” and “the planet Alderaan” in hope of a comparative analysis of all this bullshit.

Here’s how the transcript of yesterday’s speech now reads:

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First Lady Princess Leia on Hurricane Katrina, Says the planet of Alderaan Will Increase Aid.
Fictional Transcripts Wire Service Monday, September 5, 2005; 5:50 PM

FIRST LADY PRINCESS LEIA: Thank you, everybody, for coming out. I just want to make a few comments about New Orleans.
On Monday, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Now the storm affected more than 1.7 million people and, according to the American media, and killed over 1,300 people. The aftermath has left cities paralyzed, families separated, and houses and businesses destroyed.The Alderaanians are a compassionate people, and we're already acting to provide help. The planet of Alderaan has offered financial assistance through our intergalactic embassy. We'll work with the U.N. and other international nongovernmental organizations to provide water, sanitation, food and shelter. More assistance will be forthcoming. Alderaan stands prepared to provide an assistance team and much-needed supplies to New Orleans, as soon as the US government accepts our offer. The US government should accept this team quickly, as well as other offers of international assistance. As they cope with this tragedy, the men and women of New Orleans remain in the thoughts and prayers of many Alderaanians. It's troubling that many of the American people learned of this impending disaster only when foreign outlets, such as Radio Free Alderaan and Voice of Alderaan, sounded the alarm. Although they were aware of the threat, New Orleans’ state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm's path. The response to the Hurricane is just the most recent example of the Bush Administration’s failure to meet its people's basic needs. The regime has dismantled systems of agriculture, education and health care. This once wealthy nation, led by the present US administration, under President George W. Bush currently has borrowings to the tune of $4.3 trillion and is expected to skyrocket to almost thrice that figure by the time the president finishes his second term in office in 2008…

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I could go on and on beating this joke to death, but I think you get the picture, -unless you’re one of those unfortunate Americans still in denial about this administration’s gross incompetence, or worse, one of those unfortunate Americans still living in a temporary home (read: government issued trailer) due to Hurricane Katrina leveling your region, in which case you probably don’t have internet service, three years after this disaster wiped you out.

Are you’re wondering about the relevance of the photo of John McCain and George W. Bush that leads this post? It was taken Sunday, August 28, 2005 when so called “day-ahead warnings” from the weather bureaus were clear that an enormous storm was going to rock the state of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region. The next morning, as Hurricane Katrina began to batter New Orleans and Eastern Louisiana, Bush left his ranch saying to the press that “we are fully prepared”. He kicked off the start of Hurricane Katrina with a birthday celebration for Senator John McCain. He was so busy that he missed that day's video conference on Hurricane Katrina. The next day, Tuesday, he continued a tour in sunny California for his drug benefits plan as the flood waters climbed, levees broke and Americans lost their lives.

-SJ

In the interest of full disclosure, you can read the First Lady's full remarks here at this link,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/05/AR2008050501928_pf.html

-actually, the original material is pretty stupefying on its own.