The Failure of the Political Classes

One of the most striking things about the Katrina disaster has been the entirely predictable and utterly contemptible response of the political classes. As horror after horror unfolded on the nation's TV screens the activists and the ideologues sprung into action. It is hard to say which were the most despicable.

Environmentalists immediately tried to blame the Bush administration for the hurricane itself, arguing that their refusal to implement the Kyoto agreement was somehow responsible. This argument was so nonsensical that it was quickly rejected by the public and abandoned by the news media, but it stands as marker of the cynicism, the opportunism, and the ideologically-driven divorce from reality that characterizes the "green" movement.

Anti-war activists tried to argue that the breakdown of order in New Orleans after the storm was Bush's fault because there were not enough troops locally available due to the Iraq war. We heard a lot of this in the early going, but the deployment of troops by the tens of thousands over the past couple of days has given the lie to this position and it has slowly receded from media reports.

Mickey Kaus, however, thinks that this argument has legs. He writes:

[T]he hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

Read him here.

The racists and Marxists came out in force, as they always do. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton both argued that resources were being withheld from blacks because the administration either hated or didn't care about black people. It is a measure of the racist rot that permeates our political system that such outlandish charges were given a degree a credence by respectable news organizations and by many blacks. These charges will not die away like those leveled by the greens and the anti-war movement because, while unrealistic, they are politically useful. Blacks are a core constituency of the Democratic Party and the Bush administration in recent years has begun to make inroads into that group. This is an opportunity for Democrat politicians and activists to rein in a constituency that was threatening to drift away from their control. Expect to hear a lot "Bush doesn't care, and that's why people died" crap coming from race hustlers, including white Democrats, in the future.

I have just come across a nice piece on this subject by Rick Moran in The American Thinker. He writes:

Bringing race and class into the national conversation about the aftermath of the hurricane is a sham. It’s real purpose is to open another avenue of attack on the President using the tried and true grounds of racism to advance a political agenda. All done at the expense of the very people the professional racialists claim to be speaking for.

Read it here.

The real damage done by these attacks is not to Bush or the Republicans, but to America's reputation in the world. These quotes were picked up and repeated by media all around the globe. See here.

Equally despicable was the response from Republicans. There were several suggestions to the effect that somehow the victims were culpable because they did not heed the evacuation orders. Certainly there were many people who for some reason or other decided to ride out the storm when they could have evacuated [I've lived in both Florida and North Carolina and am quite familiar with the mentality -- in fact, I've attended quite a few hurricane parties myself]. But this ignores the fact, perhaps excessively dwelt on by the media, that many people -- the elderly, the sick, the poor -- simply could not leave. Such statements reinforce the opinion, and to some degree validate, the impression that many Republican leaders simply don't care about the common people. It's true, many of them don't [but the same could be said about Democrats too] and their insensitivity was on full display in the early hours after the storm.

In this regard the most despicable utterances came from House Speaker Denny Hastert who suggested that there was no reason to waste money rebuilding New Orleans. The suggestion makes a weird sort of sense if all you think about is the geographical undesirability of the city's location, but it reveals a social and cultural insensitivity that is staggering in its scope. The Republican Party would do well to relieve Speaker Hastert of his position.

And then there was the attempt to deflect criticism of the nation's energy policy. In recent months the administration has been increasingly coming under fire as energy prices rose. Now there was a rush to blame the prices on Katrina, and to focus attention on the price at the pump. Such talk once again reinforces the idea that the administration, and Republicans in general, are more concerned with the impact on corporate and middle class interests than the plight of the poor.

And then there are the agency heads. One after another they stood in front of microphones to tell us that things were going much better than we thought, that their agencies were functioning well, that great things were being accomplished offscreen -- assertions that were blatantly contradicted by the images appearing on people's TV screens. Things were not going well in New Orleans, and the failure of administrators to publicly admit so was, to put it kindly, the mouthing of imbeciles.