Hastert’s a Fat Pot of Crap

What an incredible asshole:

Asked in an interview with the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago paper, whether it makes sense to spend billions rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, a reference to New Orleans, Hastert replied, "I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me."

He added it was a question "that certainly we should ask. And, you know, it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed."

Hastert expressed sympathy for victims of the hurricane and said "we are going to rebuild this city. We can help replace, we can relieve disaster."

At the same time, he said "we ought to take a second look at it."

"But you know, we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness," he said.

Some total prick has to say some shit like this after every natural disaster, but how many places are there in the United States where there isn’t the risk of one natural disaster or another? Floods or droughts, earthquakes or hurricanes, blizzards or heat waves. In 1990, a tornado a mile and a half wide tore through the Illinois town of Plainfield, leaving 29 people dead and leveling most of the town. Now, I’m not suggesting that what happened in Plainfield is equivalent to the unbelievable nightmare going on in New Orleans right now, but should Plainfield not have been rebuilt?

I don’t know—from everything I’m reading, it sounds to me like much of this could have been prevented with the proper (and fully funded) preparations, which isn’t at all about whether New Orleans lies below sea level and has everything to do with whether the issues brought on by lying below sea level are successfully addressed.

Hopefully Rana can shed some more light on this, since she’s (quite literally) the expert.