One of the plusses of my current job situation is that I’m able to drive only a few miles a day, and some days don’t have to drive at all. When I was in the car today, I caught part of the Laura Ingraham show (en route to a track) and part of the Michael Savage show (to and from the supermarket). If the 15-20 minutes I heard were at all representative, the opinions of ordinary, talk-radio listening Americans on the 2005 Flood are as follows.

1) The government – local, federal, whatever – is pathetically incompetent.
2) Why is our National Guard in Iraq, again?
3) Why didn’t the government declare martial law and shooting-looters-on-sight before the hurricane, just in case?
4) The hurricane struck New Orleans because of the 100 million babies killed by legal abortions.
5) The looting in New Orleans is the end result of a moral decay that started with legal abortion.

Now, if you’re one of these guys who thinks Roe v. Wade is responsible for what’s happening in New Orleans, here’s what you do. Take a surgical knife and cut your vas deferens, then close it. Your genetic material needs to be contained and quarantined, stat. If you think this and you’re female, consult a doctor – that’s a more complicated procedure.

This opinion seemed totally crazy at the time, but I think it’s an offshoot of a widely-held belief – New Orleans is structuraly fucked, and many of its inhabitants are inhuman brutes who should be shot on sight. There’s a really frightening hint of this in a Survey USA poll taken overnight which suggests 31% of Americans don’t think New Orleans should be rebuilt, and only 30% think if it is rebuilt, it shouldn’t be with public money. And there’s a breakdown by race. 79% of blacks think it should be rebuilt, and 77% of Hispanics think so. But only 59% of whites want it to happen.

I keep hearing that this is a Christian nation. Can we start seeing some proof, already?

UPDATE: Just heard Franklin Graham on “Hannity and Colmes” say the looting “is what happens” when you “take God out of the schools.” Sorry, Franklin. It’s castration for you.