Byrdman

From a recent speech by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia), born the same year as my dad (and JFK too, for that matter):

"Who among us did not shrink in dread from the specter of our fellow citizens' bodies floating in the murky flood waters or stacked in hospital stairwells for want of anywhere else to house them? Could this be happening in a major American city? Could we be so inept at dealing with this tragedy? The events of the past several days seem to have reduced our much touted American know-how and technology to little more than children's toys, strangely impotent in a real crisis. I know that many Americans cringed, as I did, at the vision of callous neglect of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens which flashed around the world, making the United States appear to be a nation unmindful of its own, a nation unable to handle a disaster about which it had ample notice, a country loudly touting our form of government to the world, while failing to provide even the most basic protections to our own citizens."

Yeah, maybe more often than not these guys sound like blowhards, but... give me this kind of old-fashioned blowhard any day over, say, Rick Santorum.

The Byrd bio: