Posted on 09/15/2005 11:37:53 PM PDT by curtisgardner
Whatever the shortcomings of the Bush administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies in responding to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans, it's now clear to any fair-minded observer that the major responsibility for the failure to adequately prepare, to order a mandatory evacuation earlier and to respond to those left behind belongs to local authorities, specifically New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
Predictably, partisan Democrats, media liberals and pathological Bush-haters have ignored or downplayed Nagin's and Blanco's culpability and focused their attacks on President Bush. Their strategy is transparent. It's about much more than New Orleans.
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It's about Social Security reform, repeal of the death tax, the war in Iraq, Supreme Court nominations, drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nuclear energy, global warming, the Kyoto Treaty, expansion of the welfare state, abortion, gay marriage and most anything else on the president's legislative and policy agenda. It's all about the destruction of the Bush presidency.
With casualties mounting in Iraq, rising oil prices, always-present economic uncertainty and stalled legislative initiatives, Bush's popularity ratings are dropping in public opinion polls. The president's opponents smell blood in the water and they've seized on New Orleans as the long-hoped-for deathblow to derail the Bush agenda.
New Orleans has become a rubric for a host of political causes. The left sees it as an object lesson in the virtue of collectivism over individualism; a demonstration of the essential need for ever bigger government. Never mind that the object lesson, here, is just the opposite.
New Orleans has long been infamous as the model for corrupt government in the name of populism. Billions of dollars of federal aid that have poured into the state over the years could have been put to much better use in flood prevention than the pork barrel projects to which it was diverted. Hucksters of the politics of racism have contrived a conspiracy theory of indifference toward blacks in the city by white America. (The same white America that sent billions to aid the nonwhite victims of the recent Asian Tsunami.) Jesse Jackson and his ilk have made a career out of this.
Another drumbeat has been the poverty angle, with the goal of expanding the welfare state. ABC reporter Chris Cuomo intoned, "Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the most economically destructive event in America since the Great Depression, the last time the country responded with unprecedented sweeping changes to help the least fortunate. Today may demand an equal effort." A Newsweek cover story, "Poverty, Race & Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame," lamented our stinginess toward the poor. A Denver Post editorial asserted "the need for America to declare war on the nation's growing poverty problem."
Of course we'll help the victims of Katrina in New Orleans and elsewhere. There's already been a spectacular outpouring of private and corporate generosity and people welcoming evacuees into their homes. But let's not go off the deep end on public policy.
Lyndon Johnson launched the "war on poverty" 40 years ago. The Post must have missed the official declaration. Since then, government has spent upward of $10 trillion on more than 75 different state and federal poverty programs. Federal poverty spending in 2005 alone is more than $400 billion, an increase of 42 percent since Bush took office in 2001. Yet poverty still exists, and always will. It's a relative term, especially in a free and wealthy nation like ours. The essential point is that there is nothing approaching abject poverty in this country. Most of the "poor" in America enjoy more material comforts than Europe's middle class and live like nobility compared to the underdeveloped world's poor. Don't be misled by Census Bureau statistics labeling 37 million Americans as "poor." The definition is oversimplified and the figures overstated.
A med school student living off checks from Mom and Dad is statistically poor, as are many elderly couples with net worth in six figures. Poor households consume twice as much as their official earnings, which exclude billions of dollars in noncash government entitlements like Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies and unreported income. There are many more pitfalls in the data.
Poverty is more a matter of prospects than income. It's a transitory condition for most. According to a Census Bureau study between 1996 and 1999, 80 percent of those under the poverty line were above it in less than a year.
The danger of government poverty programs is that they can seduce their wards into dependency, draining them of ambition and personal responsibility. The last thing we should learn from New Orleans is to expand the poverty trap.
BUMP!!
And I am beginning to smell another "rope a dope", by W.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Misunderestimated again.
Katrina seemed to be the catalyst.
"it's now clear to any fair-minded observer that the major responsibility for the failure to adequately prepare, to order a mandatory evacuation earlier and to respond to those left behind belongs to local authorities, specifically New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco."
Well, hello! It was clear to some of us from day one!
It is because they are bleeding.
bttt
If there was every a reason for the poor to take a hard look at themselves and how they got there, it is now.
I attribute much of it to the Democrats, who keep so many people dumb and poor and dependent, because they are easy to manipulate.
You said a lot in a little space there.
Thanks.
Smell blood alright. But, of themselves rotting and dying.
I agree. I thought Bush's speech tonight was, once again in a crisis, bold and visionary.
In the process he may have eviscerated the Democratic Party stranglehold on black voters.
LOL...
Especially after tonights speach.
Watching the press talking-chuckle-heads I noticed it got good reviews from everyone except Jessie Jackson.
Its a bold plan, costly, but bold. And it will expose Louisiana politics to more scrutiny than it has ever had before, and maybe, just maybe we can pry that corrupt state government's hands away from the money.
I think you're on to something.
Good article. Michael Brown lost his job through the incompetency of the mayor of NOLA and the Governor of LA.
That was my take on his speech as well.
Interesting article. Thanks for posting. :o)
what r u doing up in the middle of the night?
Hey Rca2000 help me out -- what's rope a dope - i hear it all the time and don't have clue.
and how is Pres. Bush going to do one? Thanks!
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