Katrina -- memorable quotes

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody."
--Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana

"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water. They (federal officials) wanted to negotiate an organizational chart." --Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

"I have been all over the world. I've been in a lot of Third World countries where people were better off than the people here are right now. We've got 28 miles of coastline here that's absolutely destroyed, and the federal government, they're not here." --William Bissell, Air Force Captain (rtd.)

"I do think the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with newspapers and shrouds and being left there." --David Billings, The People's Institute

"George Bush doesn't care about black people." --Kanye West, rapper

"No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!" --Michael Moore

"Last night these people were told by a Louisiana state trooper that in four hours, 300 buses would be here. Well, they put their elderly and their sick up front, all neat, and the babies. They cleaned up their own areas and then they stood in line until well after midnight. Not a single bus came. Don't you believe what you've been hearing. These people are great. They were brought here, as we were, by the authorities, lots of them rescued from rooftops, and they haven't received any medication attention, any water, or one word of encouragement." -- Donelle Deffina, from California, a rare white face at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center

"A lot of people are working hard to help those who have been affected, and I want to thank the people for their efforts. The results are not acceptable." --George W. Bush

"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." --Barbara Bush

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell. --Steve Gilliard, blogger

"So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot." --Aaron Broussard

[Readers may wish to add to this list--Dr.D.]

UPDATE (September 14) There are some developments with respect to Aaron Broussard's comment about the woman in the nursing home. The man whose mother it was has been identified as Thomas Rodrigue; his mother, 92, drowned on Monday, August 29. Rodrigue had been on the telephone repeatedly on August 27 to get her out of there; the nursing home operators have now been charged with homicide. Broussard's timeline was off, as was his assessment of blame in this instance: his brain must have been overloaded with the numerous genuine instances of FEMA incompetence (links here and here) in a period of crisis. I, for one, do not accept the charges from the right half of the blogosphere that he was lying. There's too much of the "gotcha" in the commentary there, with a failure to recognize the obvious: an easily disproved lie very quickly reverses any political advantage such a lie might at first achieve. The man was not lying; but he was clearly mistaken in this instance.