Cap on !
Posted on 09/18/2005 10:16:23 AM PDT by wagglebee
"Reasonable" African Americans in New Orleans believe that the Bush administration engineered the levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina in a bid to save the city's white sections by flooding black neighborhoods, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said Sunday.
"I was stunned in New Orleans at how many black New Orleanians would tell me with real conviction that somehow the levee breaks had been engineered in order to save the French Quarter and the Garden District at the expense of the Lower Ninth Ward, which is almost all black," Robinson told NBC's "Meet the Press."
"These are not wild-eyed people," Robinson insisted. "These are reasonable, sober people who really believe that."
The levee break conspiracy theory parallels the plot outlined early last week by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry," Farrakhan told a North Carolina audience.
The Washington Post columnist's report suggests that Farrakhan's poisonous theory appears to have gained currency.
Robinson said that while he doesn't believe the levee breaks were deliberately engineered, that fact that so many blacks do "tells you something about our racial divide in New Orleans."
Yes, it tells you that Black racism is alive and well.
Yes, I think you're right. If people aren't willing to go in there and take the schools back, then how can they sit back and complain? But...they do... :)
susie
Well,I Do teach part time and I think its just as bad to INDOCTRINATE with conservative ideas as it is to do the usual liberal brainwashing that goes on today.
I question liberal orthodoxy all the time.Most kids where I live parrot it all the time without thinking.So I am constantly forcing them to dissect their beliefs and back them up with SOURCES and REAL SCHOLARSHIP,not"I feel that.....".That is not acceptable academic rigor.
Yet to stand up there in front of a class ramming GOP talking points down kid's throats is indefensable also.I will always demand critical thinking of my students and not replace an unquestioning ideology of one stripe with the opposite point of view.
I agree. Someone pointed out that this could be a good case for a slander lawsuit--but Farrakhan conveniently "declined to say" who he thought did the blasting.
People who stir up these things, who pit black people versus white people, and vice-versa, especially in such a time of crisis, deserve a special place in hell.
Reasonable maybe, but rational? What demagogue put them up to this?
I think lots of times this is just people telling the "reporter" what they know he wants to hear. The reality is that the vast majority who believe this sort of thing are the same sorts who believe the CIA or the Mossad blew up the World Trade Center towers. The vast majority are probably white.
These are foolish ignorant, brain washed people. This country is in trouble, because the lies continue continuously because of the old media.
***
The old established/liberal/socialist media is America's most ruthless, relentless, and destructive enemy.
poop
I saw him on the show. You are right. The guy is part of the lie. He's a loser PIG!
Louis Farakhan is a VERY scary dude. There is a real mental disease going on there.
Cap on !
You forgot to mention that earthen levees take time after being "upgraded" to re-compact and reach their full strength.
I would point out one additional factor. For a period of time after rebuilding/repair, the soil has not settled and is more prone to erosion. If the flood wall was overtopped and water undermined the newly compacted soil, that could have caused subsidence and collapse.
Also, there are persistent stories that a drifting barge or boat struck the flood wall and breached it. Certainly there was lots of stuff floating around -- photos of the 17th St. Canal showed a backup of floating debris at every bridge.
GMTA. < g >
You can't, not even when you tell them where the rumor came from. I've heard white liberals tell me the same thing. The AIDS hokum and that Central American children were being grown for organ harvesting by rich people both have the same origins. They were "parting gifts" from the KGB. In the mid 1980s the KGB started both disinformation campaigns at about the same time and kept them running till they closed up shop. They worked well on morons.
I'm not surprised-many "reasonable" people with whom I worked at the time believed OJ was framed by the LAPD.
That's right, the LAPD is more interested in ruining the lives of aging black football players than they are in catching someone who cuts people's heads off. And that passes for reason in some circles.
I find the wording very strange. Was he expecting that most blacks would be unreasonable? Is he ridiculing blacks for their foolishness? There are so many ways to attack this article.
I would be surprised if they didn't find a large "crater" there. The so called crater was caused by hours of water scrubbing the same place the same as hydraulic mining. To demonstrate, take a garden hose and point it at the ground. You get mud, of course but where the force of the water pressure concentrates, you get a dimple in the ground. If you hold the hose in the same place, the dimple gets bigger. Not the best way to dig a hole, but it works.
Are there levies separating different neighborhoods within New Orleans?
I don't think so.
If the land inside New Orleans flood bowl were equally elevated, keeping water in only one side of town would be a miracle of the same category as the parting of the Red Sea.
The flood damage in different sections of New Orleans can be easily explained: The earlier settlers settled on the best (highest) land and everybody from then on had to settle for progressively worse (lower) land.
The French Quarter (the oldest part of the city) was on the best (highest) land and was relatively spared. The New Orleans Garden District was settled in the 1850’s and was also on relatively good (higher) land. The modern subdivisions have been built on land that nobody would touch in the 1850's.
Yesterday, I was talking with my brother-in-law's father who is from New Orleans and was visiting here when Katrina struck. I asked him how their houses fared.
His daughter and my brother-in-law had bought a 100 year-old house in New Orleans. It had been originally built with a 2 1/2 foot elevation of the foundation above ground level. He told me it had some basement flooding and that was it. Some electrical fuse box repairs and some roof repair and it would be fine.
What about his house?
"The water is totally flooding the place. It's going to have to be bulldozed", he replied.
"How old is it?", I asked.
"Twenty years old."
So, there you have it.
Any New Orleans land was too dangerous to build on in the 1850's, is too dangerous to build on in 2005.
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