Project Katrina

One of the possible replacements for Idaho Sen. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig is the lieutenant governor (and former governor) Jim Risch. This guys is a real tool. Here’s what he said last year after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast:

Hurricane Katrina—they heaped that on George Bush!" said Mr Risch, in his shirt-sleeves in the blasting dry heat of an afternoon in Boise, the state capital. Here in Idaho, we couldn’t understand how people could sit around waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn’t whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That’s the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."

Is this the kind of tool that Idaho plans to send to the United States Senate?  I can only assume it’s easy for Risch to run his mouth about Katrina since there is no chance in hell that a hurricane will ever threaten Boise with a 30-foot storm surge. With that said, the audacity to compare a dam break to a hurricane that displaced hundreds of thousands, did hundreds of billions in damages and killed 2,000 people is beyond words?

And while we’re on the topic, what about that dam break that showed the backbone of hardy Idahoans?

He was referring to the 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam, which was built entirely by the federal government, for the benefit of a handful of whining millionaire ranchers, and when it collapsed (which had been predicted) it was not the entrepreneurs of Idaho who fixed things up, but once again, the federal government, which rebuilt the irrigation systems and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in claims, far more promptly than in Louisiana.

Interesting. Perhaps those Idaho ranchers can come on down to New Orleans and show everyone how it’s done. Ya think?