Mother Mary Rants

It's really beginning to grate on me when voice after voice tells me that Hurricane Katrina is one of the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States. "One of"? "ONE OF"?? Show me one that's worse! Show me one that has elicited the second outpouring of international sympathy in four years. Heck, I'll be generous — show me one that even comes CLOSE to being as bad.

Do not belittle this tragedy by comparing it to such relatively minor disasters as the San Francisco earthquake or the Johnstown flood, or even the great fire of Chicago (not, technically, a natural disaster). Hurricane Katrina is the worst natural disaster to befall the United States by several orders of magnitude. It's not “one of.” It's the Real McCoy.

Because New Orleans was a hotbed of democracy — both liberal and the GOP's worst pejorative, “liberal” — I live in fear that some neocon crazy like Pat Robertson is going to declare that, just like the terrorist attacks of 2001, Hurricane Katrina was the fault of women, liberals, pagans, atheists, abortionists, the ACLU, and People for the American Way: the new Sodom and Gomorrah.

To which I reply: George W. Bush was installed in office by the future Vice President's close personal friend Antonin Scalia, who persuaded the four other Republican-appointed justices to go along with him. He has turned out to be the worst president in United States history — like Katrina, worst by several orders of magnitude.

Bush in turn presided over the worst terrorist attack on the U.S. in our nation's history; the worst spending spree by any presidential administration or Congress; the worst redefinition of “democracy” to mean neo-Stalinism; the worst corruption in U.S. political history; the worst attempt to establish fundangelicalism as our national religion; and now the worst natural disaster that our nation will (I devoutly hope) ever undergo.

The fire-and-brimstone preachers may be right if and when they start in preaching about the vengeance of a wrathful God upon our nation. But I can almost guarantee you they will blame it on women, liberals, gays, and abortionists. To those fire-and-brimstone preachers (which I actually hope will exist only in my fevered imagination), I reply: George W. Bush is a worse leader than King Manasseh of Israel, who ruled in the seventh century BCE (2 Kings 21). If God is punishing our nation for anything (as the God of love so frequently does), God is punishing us for installing George W. Bush in office and keeping him there, both times unjustly.