Tsunami Aftershocks
After the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean, it took three days for President Bush to address the nation and the world, and when he did so he was apologetic, not for his delay, but for rousting reporters to his Crawford ranch during the holiday week. Well, it seems that disaster relief is now becoming hot political property, as some of our dear leaders begin to survey the damage, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist:

Bill Frist, majority leader in the U.S. Senate, visited tsunami-stricken southern Sri Lanka on Thursday and pledged U.S. government support and American private sector for tens of thousands who lost homes and loved ones.

Frist, a Tennessee Republican, was accompanied by Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana. The pair visited a Muslim school that had been turned into a camp for the homeless and the local office of Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan non-governmental organization, where they announced the donation of $150,000 worth of oral rehydration fluid for children.

Glad he's there to help. Hope this experience leaves an indelible memory about our larger responsibility to the world:

Just before his helicopter lifted off, Frist and aides took snapshots of each other near a pile of tsunami debris.

``Get some devastation in the back,'' Frist told a photographer.

Maybe not.

Much has been made by conservative commentators this last week or so regarding America's supposed stinginess. They continually point to the $350 million of pledged aid, but they forget that the first response by the US after the tsunami was to pledge $15 (which, as Jon Stewart pointed out, was about what the movie Spanglish made in its first week--and it's not even considered a hit movie). The number moved up to $35 million after the famous "stingy" comment made by UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland (which wasn't directed at specific nations--though they most assuredly know who they are--and was used in the context of annual, ongoing aid, not specific to this particular disaster), and eventually had a zero added to it. But Robert Reich over at American Prospect notes that even this amount is worrisome first in its size compared with other nations/GDPs and secondly in where it's coming from:

The United States government has pledged $350 million in disaster relief for countries devastated by the underground earthquake that sent a wall of water across the Indian Ocean. $350 million is a lot of money, but, notably, it's less than the $660 million pledged by Germany. And America's contribution is far less, as a proportion of our national wealth, than other advanced nations. Even tiny Norway has pledged $180 million.

America's $350 million isn't even new money. The administration admits it's taking it out of what's already budgeted for disaster and famine assistance around the world. That means the United States will be contributing $350 million less to relief efforts in the Sudanese region of Darfur, for example, and other needy places -- sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Inevitably, some of our wingnut conservative commentators are turning away from the human tragedy and the outpouring of charity from all corners of the globe to questioning whether this was a tragedy at all (David Neiwert has a good compendium of this. First, Rush Limbaugh:

I have been suspicious of these numbers [of deaths in the tsunami] from the get-go. First day, 12,000; then 14,000; then 50. Then 60 then 100, then 140 -- there was even a number, 400,000 thrown around out there. And it just -- who's verifying this? I mean, has anybody actually asked for a count? Has anybody done a count? Has there been a count? How do we know this?
[...]
I'm not suggesting it's not a true, devastating disaster and so forth. But you know, we do have a tendency to blow these things up. We have a tendency to rally around disaster; it makes us feel better to contribute to it.

Then there's Michael Savage:

If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person, I am sure at some point you ask yourself, wait a minute. The epicenter of this earthquake and the resulting tidal wave was adjacent to the sex trade island of Phuket, Thailand ... and then it knocked out many, many regions of Indonesia, some of which are the most vicious recruiting grounds for Islamic terrorists. That's a fact of reality. Then going the other way, it hit Sri Lanka, ex-Ceylon. And as you well know, Sri Lanka is a viciously anti-Western nation, the home of the Tamil Tigers, who are not only separatists but anti-Westerners, anti-Christians, etc. You could argue, maybe this is God's hand, because some of their brethren struck Christian America. Maybe God speaks the truth but waits. Seeks the truth and waits. I don't know. You could argue: God struck them.

And let's not forget ultra-right Christian Fred Phelps (known for his anti-homosexual picketing, including the funeral of Matthew Shepard), who thanks God for exacting vengeance on the 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11 and for killing thousands of Swedish "fags and dykes".