Some people have asked me what I thought about second-class cartoonist, third-class columnist, and kingergarten-class moron Ted Rall’s column telling people not to give money to the Red Cross because it’s BIG GOVERNMENT’S responsibility, not private charity.
I suppose I should say something other than “Who spiked his sippy-cup with Idiot Juice this morning?”
Let’s just take potshots at bits and pieces, and the rest falls apart:

• “Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the ’80s”
  Actually, the Federal Government been shirking its responsibilities long before then. When you see “grow” and “Federal Government” in the same sentence, that’s pretty much a no-no when it comes to the original concept of the American Dream.
• “when
  Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor and unlucky should no longer count on “big government” to help them”
  Rall’s obsession with Reagan-hate is actually a displaced form of aggression towards his own father, who abandoned Young Ted and failed to pay his tuition to Columbia. Reagan cut back on subsidies for student loans, thus forcing Ted out of his dream-ride through an expensive college on Uncle Sam’s tab.
  It’s sort of like my insane loathing of Disney and ABC, only more wacko and insane.
• “Why should New Orleans’ dispossessed have to live in private shelters?”
  Public housing isn’t exactly the Ritz. Or would you like to “dome” yourself for a week?
  Also, public shelters tend to force themselves into blindness to real-world situations. Here in Houston, there’s been a problem with Vietnamese evacuees resorting to community and private charities and shelters because many are terrified of racist attacks if they “dome” themselves.
  Apparently Jesse Jackson and Kanye West and Al Sharpton and others waving the “Bush Hates Blacks” banner is fueling other old race-hate grudges, and the Vietnamese-Black relationship over the years makes the acrimonious Jewish-Black relationship seem like Sammy Davis Junior hugging a clone of himself in comparison.
  Also, PrideHouston has had to rescue some gays, lesbians, and transgendered evacueeds from the diverse cultural mix that was driven out of New Orleans. They have a right to shelter as well, but try to implement a fair way to protect that community in a large shelter. And we all know that “Separate But Equal” never works from history. (What’s your degree in again?)
  Public shelter arrangements do not head off problems. They react to them only when their noses have been rubbed in them. Repeatedly. Hence, even if Uncle Sam sold a kidney to pay for a bigger FEMA response, the inefficient politically-correct bureaucrats wouldn’t implement any preventitive measures.
• “There’s only one reason flood victims aren’t getting help from the government: because the government refuses to help them.”
  You know, Ted hasn’t distinguished between local, parish, state, and federal government in this rant. Does he mean all of these at once, or just the Feds?
  Disaster response depends on first responders at the local and state level to implement the plans they’ve prepared. As we’ve clearly seen, Nagin and Blanco didn’t have adequate plans in place, and neither implemented them worth a darn at all. To head this all up at the Feds to sort out at a moment’s notice is downright ludicrous.
• “For our leaders the optional war against Iraq is such a priority, which the Congressional Budget Office expects to cost $600 billion by 2010.”
  The CBO obviously is unaware of the 50k troops planned to return because the Iraqi Government is working on “disinviting” them, and more will return as Iraq secures itself… or falls apart into Shi’iastan, an independent democratic Kurdistan, and a nice wide practice bombing range for the Syrian Army in the west and Baghdad.
• ” That’s four or five Katrinas right there. (That’s also where the levee money went.)”
  Odd. I thought the levees were recently upgraded and the additional money went towards luring more casinos to New Orleans, upgrading the now-ruined Canal Street trolley, etc. Local politician priorities right there, out in the open, ugly as ever.
• “Disaster relief is too important to be left to private fundraisers, with their self-sustaining fundraising expenses, administrative overhead (nine percent for the Red Cross)”
  I shudder to think what the administrative overhead is for the Federal, State, and Local governments.
  Hold on… I just did a Google Search, found the figure.
  It’s not pretty (This is using the SarahK Scale of Prettiness.)
• “As we watched New Orleanians die of thirst, disease and anarchic violence in the face of Bush Administration disinterest and local government incompetence, millions of us did the only thing we thought we could to do to help…”
  I’ll agree with the incompetence bit, with just the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool as a prime example, but not the Bushian Disinterest. FEMA and the Armed Forces aren’t exactly things you can push a button and yell “GO!”
• “Tragically, that generosity feeds into the mindset of the sinister ideologues who argue that government shouldn’t help people–the very mindset that caused the levee break that turned Katrina into a holocaust and led to official unresponsiveness.”
  Holocaust?
  I thought Ted had a degree in History from Columbia, and he’s tossing out the holocaust word to compare a few hundred deaths in a natural disaster mismanaged by incompetent and corrupt local and state officials to tans of millions in a systematic genocidal campaign? (I include the massacred Gypsies, homosexuals, cripples, POWs, and other victims of the N-word camps)
  Twit.

Feel free to hold your nose, sniff Ted’s rotten fish of a column trying to get readership through empty ranting, and make your own remarks.