Jack Cafferty

Unvarnished truth:

The thing that's most glaring in all of this is that the conditions continue to deteriorate for people who are victims and the efforts to do something about it don't seem to be anywhere in sight. [...]

The questions that we ask in The Situation Room every day are posted on the website two or three hours before we go on the air and people who read the website often begin to respond to the questions before the show actually starts. The question for this hour is whether the government is doing a good job in handling the situation.

I gotta tell you something, we got five or six hundred letters before the show actually went on the air, and no one - no one - is saying the government is doing a good job in handling one of the most atrocious and embarrassing and far-reaching and calamatous things that has come along in this country in my lifetime. I'm 62. I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco, I remember a lot of things. I have never, ever, seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people in the Superdome. What is going on? This is Thursday! This storm happened 5 days ago. This is a disgrace. And don't think the world isn't watching. This is the government that the taxpayers are paying for, and it's fallen right flat on its face as far as I can see, in the way it's handled this thing.

We're going to talk about something else before the show's over, too. And that's the big elephant in the room. The race and economic class of most of the victims, which the media hasn't discussed much at all, but we will a bit later.

This guy's quickly becoming a national hero.  He's telling it exactly like it is on national corporate media, and he's been absolutely on point for hours now.  He has been since the beginning of this crisis.  Paging Mr. O'Reilly: this is what the no-spin zone looks like.  Cafferty's always been sort of a curmudgeonly imitation, CNN's version of an "everyday guy" usually focused on financial matters.  He's been indispensable in this crisis, delivering absolute truth to power, saying what everyone is thinking.

The media is seeing this thing as up-close as anyone. Their simmering rage is telling.