Fox Sports' Chris Myers mocks Katrina victims as "standing on a rooftop trying to blame the government"
May 18, 2010 6:17 pm ET by Brian Frederick
Yesterday, Fox Sports reporter Chris Myers guest hosted The Dan Patrick Show and raised some eyebrows with comments about the flooding in Nashville. As noted by the sports blog The Big Lead, Myers said:
MYERS: It's a great country here. We have disasters issues when people pull together and help themselves and I thought the people in Tennessee, unlike -- I'm not going to name names -- when a natural disaster hits people weren't standing on a rooftop trying to blame the government, okay. They helped each other out through this.
And Mike Helton, president of NASCAR, Tony Stewart, among some drivers went from the race over to the middle Tennesee area where still a lot of hardworking, tax-paying, legal American citizens have been affected by the floods and are trying to rebuild their lives and they are helping out. And I think that other people around the country, of course the music industry in and around Nashville helping, without making a big deal out of it and I think that's a good thing.
Myers' comments about the people of New Orleans are disgusting.
People were not standing on their rooftops "trying to blame the government" -- THEY WERE TRYING NOT TO DROWN.
And many people did drown. According to The Times-Picayune, researchers have found that "two-thirds" of the more than 1,400 victims of Katrina in New Orleans "either drowned or died from illness or injury brought on by being trapped in houses surrounded by water." And the "rest died from maladies or injuries suffered in or exacerbated by an arduous evacuation -- or an inability to evacuate quickly enough, including many who died in local hospitals that lost power and other life-sustaining services."
(Also note Myers' framing of the people of Nashville as "tax-paying, legal American citizens." Nice.)
Myers should apologize to the people of New Orleans, the people of Nashville and all Americans.
(You can contact Fox Sports president Ed Goren at ed.goren@fox.com.)
Yeah, how dare those people in New Orleans stand on rooftops!
Oh wait, that's right, they were standing on rooftops because they were trying not to drown during a horribly mismanaged disaster relief effort.
Never mind.
And the federal government WAS to blame for that slow and inadequate response.
Bush knew a full 3 days before Tuesday afternoon that a Category 5 storm was likely to hit New Orleans and the surrounding areas. They should have begun preparing everything that day, and they didn't! That's why most support didn't arrive until Thursday or Friday, because they didn't really start to react until Tuesday!
Apparently, some Dem mentioned Bobby Jindals requests for federal help with the oil eruption as being out of character for a "small government" type of wingnut. I didn't hear the original comments, only El RushbO's paraphrasing, which are usually pretty far from the original quotes, but I imagine hypocrisy like that is hard to resist pointing out.
By the time Rush was done spinning his fairy tale, the Dems were trying to prevent federal assistance, and trying to destroy the LA coastline just to make Piyush look bad. Of course, for reasons Rush couldn't quite articulate through his stuttering and blustering, the oil leak in the Gulf was entirely different than Katrina, and is much more deserving of help.
He's got the schtick down.
As devastating as the floods in Tennessee were, they can't compare to the destruction of the Gulf Coast. More than 1,800 people died. 90% of the city of NO was flooded and it is considered the biggest natural disaster in the history of the United states.
I have to question the motives of anyone who'd make this comparison. I'd venture to say that his lowlife really meant to say "...a lot of hardworking, tax-paying, legal, WHITE American citizens have been affected by the floods."
Chris Myers used to work here in New Orleans. WWL-TV (1982-1988)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWL-TV
That's the line that moved Myers' comments from "miserable" to "despicable" for me.
I had written a longer comment, including a link mentioning that TN receives more in Fed funding than they pay in taxes, as do a lot of the states. I wrote this not as a dig at the average Tennesseean in their time of trouble, but because I'm so sick of the Republicam mythology of the self-sufficient bootstrap-pulling red states.
I had to write it again, as I'd forgotten that d****bag is now verboten by the profanity filter. I wish MMFA would set it so your entire post isn't lost when naughty words are detected.
Here's a link to how much each state receives in return for each dollar sent to the Federal government.
We in the blue states do seem to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting when compared to our teabagging brethren in the red states.