There’s a pseudo-scandal right now about Bobby Jindal’s supposed lies about his activities around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It all depends on the meaning of “during Katrina,” and that varies by the person. We tend to refer to “Katrina” as the overall situation, and “the storm” to refer to the bad weather we experienced on 8/29/05.
Treacher has some great comments on that phenomenon: A New Orleans resident speaks about the meaning of “during Katrina”. Because of my husband’s job, we had a permit to return home soon after the storm.
This photo was taken the day after that bad weather event at an intersection about five minutes from my house, but the flooding isn’t storm surge or broken levees. It’s thanks to the phenomenally bad judgment of one Aaron Broussard, who sent away the pump operators as non-essential personnel. Instead of just putting them up in the same places where police and other essential personnel holed up, he sent them hundreds of miles away. This generated over three BILLION dollars worth of flooding, extending “Katrina” time for tens of thousands of people. It’s ironic in the extreme that the left’s attack on Jindal for his statements about events in the storm’s aftermath – since confirmed by video of the late (great) Sheriff Harry Lee – are a mirror image of their uncritical, cheerleading acceptance of Broussard’s lies on Meet The Press.
But Broussard got a pass for ridiculous, easily disproved lies, while Jindal’s every word is carefully parsed. For my family, “Katrina” means Saturday, August 27, 2005 when we knew that the storm was coming and we had to evacuate, until a few months after the storm. During those months we lived in a more or less deserted city, and as Treacher’s correspondent noted, didn’t bother ourselves with niceties like speed limits. Depending on where we went, we carried guns. We lived off of our canned goods and on MREs. My chainsaw felt like a permanent appendage, and cutting wood seemed like the only way to get a reprieve from that indescribable Katrina smell. And for me, it Katrina wasn’t really over until the smell was gone and there were birds again.
But...