"I WILL DEMAND MORE SENSITIVE HURRICANES!
Posted on 08/14/2004 2:02:37 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
It is with a heavy heart that I write this. I have no idea what is wrong with people today in this society and this country. My example I am going to use is a really really sad one.
I was in Plant City as of Thursday night which for those who do not know is just north east of Tampa/St.Pete. I went down there to help a friend of mine who owns a house who happens to be a single mother of a 2 yr old girl. She needed help boarding up her house and sandbags etc.
All finished by 2 am there and I decided I was going to go over to a portion of Tampa called locally "New Tampa", where another friend of mine was readying her home up with her brothers. It was only 30 mins away from Plant City and definitely in the "expected"path of Charley.
I wound up falling asleep there around 4 am and woke up around 6:30 am to see that everything was still a go and a green light for Tampa. We had a few more things to move outside and the sandbags because it is a low lying area that floods from regular storms.
We went out to grab something to eat at a local Wendy's where the wait in the drive thru was about 45 mins long considering everything local had closed already by 11 am. When we got back to the house we were watching storm coverage and then about 20 mins later noticed the shift in the storm. We saw that the storm itself was more than likely going to move into the Cape Coral area.
I decided it was time for me to make my decision and it was quick. 10 seconds. I got into my car and drove over to my friends home in Lakeland. Unfortunately by the time I got over there he had hauled it over to a friends house in Arcadia.
I knew I was racing against time on I-4 and that Charley was breathing down my neck. But was more than confident I would make it back to Melbourne in time before Charlie hit Central Florida...and I did.
With about 60 mph winds everything was ok here and we even managed to keep power the entire time. So we were spared and were lucky...our friends 30 miles to the west of us couldn't say the same.
So all of my phone calls were put into friends in Naples where I used to live up til March of this year,Fort Myers,Cape Coral,and Bonita Springs. All had no power and were trying to save cell batteries but were alive. But here is where the BARF ALERT comes in.
3 of them managed to in the span of 60 seconds say "this is Jeb Bush's storm...he really screwed this one up","your boy Jeb is going to have a lot of explaining to do with this one","I am sure Jeb and George will come play the healer for their own injuries they caused."
I was sicken to my stomach. Just not that these people were my friends and usually very educated and well spoken...BUT THEY MEANT IT!
I said listen...this storm was all over the news for a week. The hurricane warning had been issued within 36 hrs...evacuation orders were given...this is mother nature...science..you can't predict this kind of thing and we all saw it with our own eyes..the storm turned right...not Jeb Bush forcing it to the coast.
Every single person bought into the entire "the Bush's never know what to do when something is going on ala the morning of 9-11",obviously a Michael Moore style of brainwashing that people have sickingly adopted from his film.
If it was not bad enough to hear it was when I turned on local talk radio and listened to my fellow Floridians bash the national hurricane center,the national weather service,jeb bush,and the media for causing such huge errors in the state and ignoring other possible tracks. That Jeb Bush spoke with arrogance and cockiness that the storm was definitely going to hit Tampa.
Last I checked the NHC saved millions of lives by posting updates every 3 hrs...the national weather service saved millions of lives by posting tornado warnings and flood watches and warnings,and Jeb Bush was up for 3 straight days and still is down south trying to do whatever a HUMAN BEING can do.
The nerve of a reporter to ask him "you are down here and the cameras are here...but do you really mean it when you say you are going to make sure people get help? Do you mean it?"
Or CNN saying "well the president's trip with his brother will be more about not wanting to lose Florida and the 27 electoral votes than showing compassion", I have absolutely had it with this kind of crap. I really pray for humanity to come along one day and to stop blaming everyone else for their problems and for things out of all of our control...like category 4 hurricanes.
So sorry about your "friends". Sometimes it takes something like this to really know people. They make the good people of Florida who are struggling to turn their disaster right side up look even more heroic.
Maybe "thousands" or even "tens of thousands," but if the gov't wasn't there to do the job, the private sector would at least partially compensate, and the lives would still be saved.
But yeah, your point that the gov't under Jeb is acting in a responsible and comprehensive manner to inform and organize so people can defend themselves is right on.
"I WILL DEMAND MORE SENSITIVE HURRICANES!
I feel for ya, Headache...I recently had the very same emotion when I was with an old friend of the family I had the opportunity to work with on a church project.
As we sat shooting the breeze, I mentioned that earlier in the day, I was in the city of Alameda -- an island in the San Francisco Bay accessible only by a short bridge and a tunnel from Oakland -- and said that I can't go into a tunnel anymore without thinking about how I would be doomed if terrorists exploded it. Now that terrorism had been brought up, he said that he thought that Al Qaeda and Bush were "in cahoots."
I was stunned in the same way you surely were. I carefully asked him where he got that idea. He said that it was his viewing of footage of Bush in the Florida school -- that when "the man" (Andrew Card) whispered in his ear, Bush's response was not one of panic, but of, "It's done? Good."
I grilled him for two hours about the veracity of his source material, and he swore that he hadn't seen Fahrenheit 9/11, but he was a veritable fountain of regurgitated leftist conspiracy bilge (Saudi family ties, Halliburton, the USA's previous support of bin Laden and Hussein, plot by oil-rich power brokers to destroy technology that would reduce petroleum dependancy ["They're holding back the car that runs on water!"], etc.).
It's very depressing when your respect for someone's intelligence erodes in the course of one conversation.
Maybe "thousands" or even "tens of thousands," but if the gov't wasn't there to do the job, the private sector would at least partially compensate, and the lives would be saved. But yeah, your point that the gov't under Jeb is acting in a responsible and comprehensive manner to inform and organize so people can defend themselves is right on.
You are right about them not being true friends. I lost, what I thought were good friends, from IL earlier this year because I finally got fed up with the Pres. Bush hate articles showing up in my email. Finally lost it one evening and email back telling them to no longer send me articles that were pure with no basis of facts about our President.
BINGO CindyDawg. I thought I must be the only person who thinks like that. When the gas prices were at the highest, I didn't see less vehicles on the Houston loops which told me we weren't as bad off as the media tells us. It was costing me all of $2.40 more to fill up my tank. (but hey, I whimpered about it just like everyone else) :o)
Isn't Shep from the Gulf South - Mississippi maybe? He knows firsthand about hurricanes. These whining hurricane victims - can't be natives - ain't seen nothing yet. Wait til they are without power for a few more days/weeks - then they will really be cranky. They will never realize how fortunate they are to still be alive.
You need new friends.
Good for you!
Yeah, I griped about the pocket change too. It wasn't so much that I couldn't afford it but that I felt somewhere, someone just taking advantage of a situation. Kind of like when 911 hit. Prices immediately went up, doubling. The owners got checked real fast though. I just got even this time by dropping to the cheap stuff. I think we have been had. My car runs just fine on it. I haven't switched back yet:')
Find some new friends with some common sense.
Different friends...politics aside...these people are usually really nice people...maybe because they rarely do discuss politics with me...and by the looks of it...there is good reasons why.
Yes Shep does come from Miss..he also spent over 10 yrs working in South East Florida for WSVN out of Miami and before that he worked over on the west coast of Florida so he knows the area's really well.
If President Bush could walk on water, the Rats would say, "see he can't swim."
More proof that the Rats have a lock on the "stupid" vote.
LOL!
I haven't heard any of this up in Orlando/Orange County. Even from the lefties in the crowd. Anyone that says this is an idiot. I would call them on their stupidity. Pure stupidity is all that is coming from these individuals.
I suggest you should just keep your eyes and ears peeled and you will see what I and some others on FR are seeing and hearing...very similar stories.
Again, I say, that I didn't vote for Clinton. I didn't like him but I never hated him, I never wished for him to die, etc. It's absoltely pathetic. In my opinion, people who truly hate, for whatever reason, are very unhappy people to begin with, and Bush is just an outlet for them.
Many of our millitary were denied their right to vote. There was voter fraud in Florida. I believe three liberal newspapers conducted their own recount and confirmed that Bush had won.
You can tell that to these people, but they are too irrational to listen to reason. It's very sad.
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