GA Gov. Perdue: Bless Riley’s Heart
Southerners know that in the South you can say anything you want about anybody as long as you add “Bless his heart” - to demonstrate, I suppose, you are not poor-mouthing but that you have real concern for the individual and his shortcomings. As in, “She doesn’t have the sense God gave a fence post. Bless her heart.” Or, “His drinking problem is going to do him in. Bless his heart.”
The Alabama-Georgia water wars escalated to the point that Georgia’s Gov. Sonny Perdue leaned on the tradition and, in response to Riley’s op-ed, laid one on our own Gov. Bob Riley in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “My good friend, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, bless his heart, is just plain … misguided.”
Hat tip to bethbking who wrote, “Sonny Perdue’s response was near hostile, and by hostile I mean delicious.”
Perdue’s upset because the press he’s been getting in his own state has been hostile to him.
Comment by Anonymous — October 26, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
Georgia seems to think the rest of us have not been suffering through a severe drought until suddenly they too were starting to run short of water.
Comment by Cam Ward — October 26, 2007 @ 4:53 pm
I grew up in a small town about 40 miles south of Atlanta, and my mother still lives there. Until my father passed away earlier this year, he was an avid gardener who could grow almost anything — fruit, vegetables, beautiful daylilies. They have been living with water use restrictions for years. That means no sprinklers, limited hand watering, using waste water for the garden, and hoping just enough rain would fall to keep everything from dying. Rainstorms that passed through Birmingham usually went north of them or dissipated before reaching Georgia. Drought conditions have been substantially worse there than here. We might want to keep that in mind before we start throwing stones at the people of Georgia.
Here’s a link to a US drought map. The southeast is in a bad way, and it’s going to take cooperation, not hostility, to solve this problem.
Comment by Kathy — October 27, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
From today’s Birmingham News:
“Unlike Alabama, Georgia has taken strong steps to conserve water since a 1987-88 drought and has statewide authority to order watering restrictions, said Glenn Page, interim general manager of the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority. From 1990 to 2006, conservation efforts have cut water use per person from 146 gallons a day to 123 gallons, Page said.
Page said that Georgia ordered even-odd watering days back in June 2006, and cut the hours of even-odd watering from midnight to 10 a.m. on April 1. In May and June, several local water jurisdictions - including Atlanta and Fulton County - cut watering to one day a week, imposing fines for scofflaws.
Now all outdoor watering is banned in Georgia…”
Comment by Kathy — October 28, 2007 @ 5:31 pm
I don’t know much about nuclear power plant cooling requirements, but I can tell that Riley’s writers make a lot more sense than Perdue’s writers.
Comment by Dystopos — November 20, 2007 @ 10:21 am