Let's face it. It takes a certain degree of courage for a journalist to mock the people living along the Texas Gulf Coast -- the sprawling multicultural city of Houston in particular -- at this moment in time.

We are, in this case, talking about an editorial cartoonist -- Matt Wuerker of The Politico -- as opposed to an actual reporter or columnist.

As you can see in the screen shoot at the top of this post, the point of the cartoon appears to be that the people of Houston, and the thousands of volunteers from Louisiana, upstate Texas and all over the place, are giving too much praise to God for their deliverance and not enough thanks to agents of government.

I grew up in Port Arthur, most of which was under water in the most recent images I saw, and my late parents spent most of their adult lives in the Houston area and the Gulf Coast. That doesn't make me an expert on Hurricane Harvey. It does help me understand how Texans think and act under these circumstances. The bottom line: It's a complex region, with just as many progressives as libertarian, fundamentalist, anti-government Yahoos (or whoever that guy is in the Confederate flag shirt).

So I'll just state the question this way: If you have been watching media reports about the first responders -- government or volunteer -- and the people they have been rescuing, does the contents of this cartoon ring true to you? Is this how the people of Houston are acting?

I don't think so. And ditto for M.Z. "GetReligionista emerita" Hemingway, who lit into Wuerker in a piece at The Federalist. Consider this another installment of our ongoing series that could be called "Classic MZ." From a GetReligion point of view, this is the slam-dunk section of her essay.