Solid Block of Ise

I thought that I had misread something. I hoped that I had misread something. I wanted to know that I had misread something somewhere, and that this wasn’t what had actually happened. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what had happened.

A lot of people will probably remember that in 2005 the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. FEMA got a lot of very sharp criticism for the way it handled that disaster, as did the Fearless Leader George W. who opted to strum his guitar rather than get his hands dirty.

Now, back to current events. No one has missed the news about the raging wildfires going on i California. I’ve seen the Gubernator himself go on television to assure everyone that resources will be spent on rebuilding peoples homes as quick as possible. Personally I’m somewhat confused, didn’t anyone remember the fires that happened a few years ago? As far as I can tell these huge wildfires in California isn’t something rare, apparently it happens with a few years space between them.

FEMA recently held a press-conference defending itself and patting themselves on the back for doing a much better job than back in ‘05 with the Katrina-disaster.

The only problem was that the entire thing was completely arranged.

From Wikipedia:

FEMA came under intense criticism when it was revealed that a press conference on the California wildfires of October 2007 was staged. Deputy Administrator Harvey E. Johnson was answering questions from FEMA employees who were posing as reporters. Many of these questions were “soft ball” questions, intentionally asked in a way that would evoke a positive response giving the impression that FEMA was doing everything right. In this way, any scrutiny from real reporters (many of whom were only given a 15 minute notice) would have been avoided. Press Secretary Dana Perino later criticized the agency for this. Fox News aired the staged press briefing live. No one was fired.

FEMA-employees posed as journalists asking questions, while real journalists weren’t invited. The only contact real journalists had was through a conference-call to the shindig, and they were barred from asking any questions. In short, this was a completely fake arrangement designed only to make FEMA look better.

In my eyes this is yet another step that the US government is taking towards a dictatorship styled on what Stalin did in the Soviet Union. I’m pretty sure that the land of the free and the brave will soon be turned into something straight out of Animal Farm, with all the George W-clones running around shouting “four legs good, two legs bad” and making sure that some are created more equal than others.

What FEMA did was propaganda. It was a lie. It was not an accident, and only due to the US now being so heavily based on lies do they get away with a “oops, our bad” rather than having heads roll.

It’s a sad day for democracy and freedom in the USA.

Found through Slashdot

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.