Gotta love the people of New Orleans as they put on Mardis Gras.
This year’s parade theme was C’est Levee, a pun on the French expression c’est la vie , or that’s life.
Floats and props built for the Saturday evening parade in the French Quarter included hand-pulled carts elaborately decorated with blue tarps, fake broken levees, cardboard travel trailers and effigies of Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D).
One display asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting that the state might get better treatment from the French than it has from the U.S. government.
Indeed. As PR editor Jon notes, Bush Etc. didn’t give a crap about the people of New Orleans or the Gulf Coast, except for losing one day of vacation.
And even I had to hand it to Brownie the other day. He did a heckuva job at nailing the feeling at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.
“Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could,” Brown said.
But how do you exploit the weather for political gain? True, Bush did use it as a convenient exit strategy to get away from a summer of press coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s fruitless attempts to get him to acknowledge her. But let’s face it, a hurricane doesn’t offer the “talkin’ tough” and fanning-the-flames-of-fear opportunities of a terror attack.
Meanwhile, New Orleans makes the best of it.
The Mid-City parade, scheduled for Feb. 26, will have floats called “New Orleans Culture” — that’s culture as in mold — and “I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone,” a bitter twist on the line from Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
