I am often remiss in maintaining my blogroll. Every once in a while, I’ll notice that a link I thought was there isn’t. That’s probably a result of having moved from Blogger to Movable Type to WordPress. At any rate, my blogroll doesn’t adequately list everyone I think it should.

Case in point (I’ve rectified the situation since noticing it): Eject! Eject! Eject!, written by Bill Whittle.

Bill doesn’t post particularly often. Before his latest, Tribes, his last post was written on July 27th, and that was just to say that he was sorry he’d been away and that he was working on another post (one that may have transformed into Tribes, but was to be called Denial). Still, his essays are always worth the wait, and they’re worth the time they take to read them. Twice.

In Tribes, Bill deals with some of the things I said here that I don’t care about, and he does it with his usual style:

It may come as a bit of a shock to these worldly sophisticates, who are so quick to point out how parochial and ignorant we simple folk are, that the United States of America has local, state and federal governments! And that this is the order in which crises are dealt with!

A person of some modest education might have remembered that the worship and adulation fostered after 9/11 was for the NYPD and the FDNY. No one was buying FEMA hats after 9/11, because FEMA is essentially a mop-up agency. It’s the first responders, the local governments, that will determine if a city will live or die. The State — that means, the “governor”– has the sole authority to mobilize the National Guard, and the governor of the state of Louisana was not only slow to do that, she turned down NG assistance from several OTHER states as well. The President does not have the authority to drop precious egg salad sandwiches from Michael Moore’s missing helicopters. We do this ON PURPOSE. We limit the power of the federal government, as those of us fortunate enough to have spent time in Civics, rather than Self Esteem classes, are aware. This is so that we do not develop a central power so strong that eventually we end up with idiot inbred royals, or Presidentes for life, on the face of OUR money.