People in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Potatoes


From Wet Bank Guide and Suspect Device, it seems some Potato State elected officials hold a dim view of their Gret Stet colleagues and fellow citizens:

U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, referred to New Orleans as Baghdad on the bayou. "Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis," he said in October. "I believe that is true in the state of Louisiana as well."

Now the governor there is maligning us, too. "Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the curbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something" after Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Jim Risch told a British newspaper last week. "We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes, and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives," he said in The Guardian.

People in Idaho don't sit around waiting for the government to bring them drinking water, he said. "In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water." (Makes you wonder how he feels about crop subsidies.)

Gov. Risch's ignorance of what it was like in New Orleans after Katrina is matched only by his smugness. Does he really believe that if 80 percent of Boise were underwater, the entire metro area lacked electricity or running water and thousands of people had had to be rescued from their rooftops, there would be a water vendor hawking cool drinks on the street?

If the 25,000 Idaho residents who fled their homes when the Teton Dam broke in 1976 were able to recover quickly and easily, then they were fortunate. The communities below the dam certainly were fortunate that only 14 people died in the flooding.

How would those communities have fared if 100 times that many people had died in the rushing water? What if hundreds of thousands of residents had been forced to flee? What if many of them still hadn't been able to return home nine months after the disaster?

Gov. Risch is lucky not to have to bear the weight of that much loss and suffering. If only he had the grace to know it.

Aside from Senator Craig's (and, presumably, Gov. Risch's) support of wholesale GOP fraud and cronyism, exemplified by the oil tanker loads of money the usual suspects are shoveling into their pockets both from Katrina and war profiteering...did either one think I wouldn't notice the upstanding behavior of their fine constituent Alofa Time?

BOISE, Idaho (AP)--A man transporting his wife's severed head in a pickup truck collided with an oncoming car, killing a woman and her 4-year-old daughter, police said. The impact sent the head flying onto the road.

A Boise police officer was driving behind Alofa Time's truck on a busy road when he noticed the man's erratic driving and then watched him slam into the car, police spokeswoman Lynn Hightower said.

Time, 51, who was not injured, told officers he was involved his wife's death, investigators said.

After searching Time's house in Nampa, police found the decapitated body of 47-year-old Theresa N. Time in a car inside the garage, authorities said. She likely had been dead for several hours, Nampa Police Lt. LeRoy Forsman said.

I believe BEHEADING is also the culture of some Iraqis (as is using cars/trucks as lethal weapons). Maybe we should have one of OUR elected officials imply common cause with the Spud State.

Nah--maybe not. After all, we don't want to stoop to their level.