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.
And you'd think all those shots in the feet would hurt...
When you have that up, would you please ping me?
Well said if I may say so. Also was said in a column here by Star Parker
From Hyperdictionary.com--a boxing tactic: pretending to be trapped against the ropes while your opponenet wears himself out throwing punches.
I think Pres. Bush accomplished this by taking FDR's tack of putting people to work building infrastructure. People who work pay taxes, so the hit on the economy will be mitigated and the long-term results may change the ratios between classes, hopefully to the good. This leaves the Bush-haters in a bind, because FDR is their Reagan, so to speak, but they are so small-minded about regaining power, that they will continue to flail at the President who doesn't flail back; instead he deals them a left hook, as in this America-sized vision which gives hope to those who need it badly. After all, hope has to be present at the start of moving forward.
Bush's foes smell blood?
Bush's foes smell like fecal matter
I might simply make it in 3 or 4 parts - easier to digest.
Condi Rice and Colin Powell are examples of two prominent Americans who can get that job done.
The blood they smell is their own!
Maybe that blood they smell is chum.
Thanks for posting this.
I love it! And I absolutely love W!!
Personally, I think GW is brilliant. I also think he read the book, "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. It's an older book but the common sense within it is timeless.
Thanks, expat. It's great to know that the people in Southeast Asia are beginning to know how the libs lie.
Many Asian societies deeply revere integrity and dignity as essential qualities in a leader. Something Bush has shown and Blanco and Nagin have not. Blanco's crying and Nagin's foul-mouthed tirade really shook a lot of people up over here.
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