Dispassionate Conservatives: Trotting out the depraved notion that perhaps God punished Southeast Asia by sending a tsunami, rightwing extremist and conservative commentator Michael Savage asserts that the death of 150,000+ people isn't worthy of his government's aid. "We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this, as far as I'm concerned," he said on the December 31 installment of his nationally syndicated radio show. "I don't want one nickel of my money going over there. ... I am sick of being bled to death by every damn incident on the earth." Further, he asserts:

It's not a tragedy. I wouldn't call it a tragedy. It's a human disaster...

...Many of the countries and the areas in these countries that were hit by these tidal waves were hotbeds of radical Islam. Why should we be helping them destroy us? ... I think what we're doing is feeding our own demise. ... I truthfully don't believe in foreign aid.

While Indonesia is majority Muslim, he's got his facts wrong: majority-Buddhist countries Thailand (95%) and Sri Lanka (70%) lost more than 50,000 people combined with another 15,000 still missing. And India, 81% Hindu, mourns some 10,000 dead.

Earth to Sullivan: you're a gasbag. Atrios highlights conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan who, responding to Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt's comment that he preferred helping tsunami victims to fighting a war, quipped, "Earth to Whitsitt: you're a soldier." At another point, Sullivan wrote, "i'm sorry but i pay for those soldiers to fight in a volunteer army. they are servants of people like me who will never fight. yes, servants of civil masters. and they will do what they are told by people who would never go to war. that's called a democracy."