Douchebag of the Week (Aug. 22-28)
This heartwarming tweet from talk show host Neal Boortz comes via Tumblr’s abbyjean:
Boortz has also called the overwhelmingly black, poor victims of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans “human parasites” and “deadbeats,” even suggesting that a victim of Hurricane Katrina consider prostitution instead of “sucking off taxpayers.” Although Katrina’s devastation cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people, Boortz believes “Katrina cleansed New Orleans.” (thinkprogress)
not just douchey, repugnant.
Perhaps N’awlins isn’t a market that Boortz has deemed worthy of his concern or insight, but you can only marvel at this man’s sense of reasoning, which is (to put it as delicately as possible) certifiably batshit crazy:
Odd, isn’t it, that two million could get on the National Mall for Barack Obama’s inauguration without any public transportation, but 80,000 couldn’t get out of New Orleans with four days warning and busses and trains running.
No, we don’t get the comparison either.
But it appears that poor Boortz has trouble comprehending how some 1.8 million people from various locations outside of the nation’s capital and more than two months to make travel arrangements got to Washington, D.C.—despite the fact that the Washington Post reported how the day’s “transportation plan worked as well as it did because the planners fully exploited the Washington region’s biggest transportation asset: the Metrorail system.”
In addition to neglecting the Metrorail’s “highest ridership day in its three-decade history,” Boortz’s assertion of “four days warning” also ignores that a voluntary evacuation order from Mayor Ray Nagin came only one day before Katrina was upgraded to a Category 5 storm, and a mandatory evacuation wasn’t ordered until the eve of the storm’s initial landfall in Louisiana. (The entire timeline of the saga is here.)
Oh, and those “busses” and trains were running, you say?
According to his bio, Boortz’s aliases also include “Mighty Whitey and The High Priest of The Church of the Painful Truth,” although his website should be updated so that “Misinformed Douchebag” is first and foremost on that list.
