I was talking to one of our best European BUGSters on Skype, and he said he was honored to be in contact with one who, in a saner time, would be one of America’s leaders. Like most men, I get awkward when handed a sincere compliment, so I joked about it.

But he’s right. I WAS a leader, despite everything.

This makes me think of people like David Duke. Every time I hear about the Katrina disaster, I remember that oh-so-funny bumper sticker against him during his run for Governor: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”

Everybody knew that Dr. Duke’s Democratic opponent was a crook. But they didn’t choose to spend a lot of effort on it. It was Duke who eventually went to Federal prison.

So it was better to have somebody Politically Correct who put state money wherever others chose. Then came Katrina, and New Orleans was totally, unbelievably unprepared for it.

That bumper sticker said it all: We elect politically correct crooks here, to hell with how the budget is handled.

And Katrina made them pay for that exact mistake.

Did I say that no one mentions it?

It was so sophisticated, so FUNNY then: “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important.”

Oh, yes, I notice I DID say no one thinks it’s so funny now.

I doubt seriously there would have been all that rioting and looting under Governor Duke or his successors. When Lester Maddox became Governor of Georgia he announced that looters were to be Shot on sight. He said that if a riot broke out he would be there to personally take the badge off of any policeman who did NOT shoot a looter.

In Maddox’s four years in the tumultuous 1960s, there was one riot in Augusta. It was short. Every news story showed its single casualty, a black man shot dead looting a liquor store with bottles in his hands.

I repeat, that was the ONLY casualty. Looting stopped instantly. Rioters left the streets.

It was obvious that a Katrina was coming. In fact, I saw a National Geographic from a few months before it hit predicting exactly the Katrina scenario in astonishing detail.

Dave would have been prepared. He is interested in everything, and he would have known the Katrina scenario cold long before it reached NO.

But they voted for the crook, that is, forty percent of the white population and all the blacks voted for the crook.

They are still paying for it.