Truth? MSM & race hustlers, you can't handle the truth about Katrina.
Posted on 08/27/2010 4:51:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
This weekend, on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, civil rights activists and hip-hop stars will hold what they call a "healing ceremony" to commemorate the disaster. President Obama will speak at a separate event in New Orleans on Sunday. But don't expect any of these reconciliation-seeking leaders to confront the indelible stain of racial demagoguery left by the left in Katrina's aftermath. Hating George W. Bush means never having to say you're sorry.
The Olympic gold medal for racial grievance-mongering went to rapper Kanye West, who railed during a supposedly nonpolitical nationwide telethon that the government was shooting "us," that "those are my people down there," and that "George Bush doesn't care about black people!" West's vulgar exploitation of a charity drive -- which was meant to unite America -- left most viewers with the same aghast, frozen expression as the one on comedian Mike Myers' face as he tried to rescue their fundraising segment from the sewage.
Not to be outdone, the Congressional Black Caucus convened a press conference to blast news reporters for describing Katrina victims as "refugees." Yes, really. The Rev. Jesse Jackson echoed their complaint: "It is racist to call American citizens refugees." Refugees are, by dictionary definition, "exiles who flee for safety." How this could be construed as bigoted remains as much a mystery as the source of unhinged Huffington Post blogger and self-proclaimed "social justice advocate" Randall Robinson's bogus claim "that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive."
Robinson retracted the report, but did not apologize for spreading the black cannibalism tale around the world and using Katrina to vent his own anti-American venom about his country being a "monstrous fraud." Nation of Islam race hustler-in-chief Louis Farrakhan trafficked in his own baseless conspiracy-mongering about "a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach" indicating that the levee "may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry." Director Spike Lee stoked the levee truthers further, declaring, "If they can rig an election, they can do anything!"
New Black Panther Party head Malik Zulu Shabazz chimed in, calling the Katrina rescue and recovery operation a "racist occupation of subjugation rather than a relief effort," and saying it was designed "to keep non-white people in a state of subjugation on all levels, and they are viewed as expendable in order to protect the interest of the system." Donning her own tinfoil hat, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee suggested that Republican suppression of the black vote in 2000 and 2004 was to blame for the government's botched Katrina response.
Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel drove the racial wedge in deeper by comparing President Bush to brutal Alabama segregationist Bull Connor. "If there's one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget," Rangel spewed, "it's that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all." At a House hearing, a Katrina witness testified unchallenged that black New Orleans residents were victims of "genocide and ethnic cleansing."
The execrable Jimmy Carter waited a few months to unleash his own Bush-bashing bile -- at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, no less -- in February 2006. "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."
Carter's speech not only lacked basic decency. It lacked any grounding in reality. According to vital statistics released just months after the storm by the primary morgue that processed the bodies of the deceased, 48 percent of those who died in the natural disaster were black, 41 percent were white, with another 8 percent unknown and 2 percent Hispanic. Little-noted follow-up analysis confirmed those preliminary results and also debunked the myth that the poor were disproportionately affected by the storm.
Five years later, the same color-coded paranoia and political opportunism that poisoned the Hurricane Katrina recovery permeates every current conflict in the public square: Ground Zero Mosque opponents are all suspiciously funded bigots, according to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Tea Party movement is the new Bull Connor, according to every liberal New York Times columnist. President Obama's critics hate black people, according to every major black Hollywood director and hip-hop mogul. As for the soul-fixing, Nobel Peace Prize-winning commander-in-chief whose election was supposed to heal the divide, I will guarantee you he won't ever lift a finger to repudiate the cynical smear tactics against his unjustly accused predecessor.
Post-racial America, we never knew you.
How come there are no rallies or speeches in any of the other affected states? I haven’t heard anything about Mississippi, Alabama or Texas. They suffered too. Is the difference because they picked themselves up by their bootstraps and did most of the heavy lifting on their own?
/dripping with sarc/
I live in post-racial America — I really, really, really don’t care anymore.
Katrina remembrance gatherings are just yet another vent for the left to bash Bush yet the same bashers are awfully silent about the incompetence of Mayor Nagin and especially the about President Obama’s summer of 2010 handling of the gulf oil spill.
Hypocrisy is thy name.
As Rush put it yesterday, “Katrina; the disaster that keeps on giving.”
It is so amazing to watch the professional LeftStreamMedia
(previously MSM) purport “news” consisting only of reruns
from 5 years ago. 50% of the evening “news” this week
is their antiBush agenda/stories —— from 5 years ago.
No wonder they are dying as an industry.
They live in the past, and when they happen to talk about the
present (ie, real news), they just lie from one of their
tightly controlled ‘talking points’.
As other posters mentioned, Katrina didn't just hit New Orleans. And most of the other people affected by the storm have moved on with their lives.
Katrina is the CliffNotes version of Black America since The Great Society and the War on Poverty were instituted.
Just wait until they become the Gatekeepers of our health care... they show us whose boss. Check out the reports on the Health care strike in S. Africa where a seven percent pay hike in a worldwide recession wasn’t enough for these marvels of humanity.
See Post#7 by SueRae
Katrina was followed by Hurricane Rita that same year, which did serious damage to east Texas.
Ike made a direct hit on Galveston Island two years ago. There are still some signs of damage, but as a whole, the island is back in business and booming.
The difference? Texas didn't wait for the federal government to come to the rescue.
The difference is that they had elected remotely competent leadership and weren't so corrupt that their emergency system didn't completely collapse in the face of a true emergency.
FEMA is not meant to be a first responder to a major crisis. It takes a lot of time to move vast numbers of people and materials into an area that has been devastated.
It is the local government that needs to be able to coordinate the efforts because they know where the local resources are and where the areas are that are most likely to have the worst problems, not some federal official who doesn't know the area.
It was made worse by the fact that Katrina cut such a wide swath that neighboring areas couldn't step up and lend a hand and people and materials had to come from farther away, but it was essentially a failure of the local emergency response that left these people without help for so long.
The federal government's worst mistake was assuming that the local and state governments were remotely complicated and would have some resources available since the risk was well known.
You don't organize and move food, medicine, and other needed items for that many people from a thousand miles a way or more over a transportation system devastated by the storm in a matter of hours. It takes days get get enough resources in the area.
This is why the area itself needs to be prepared and have such resources locally.
In a disaster as bad as this one the local responders are bound to be overwhelmed. The next step up is the state government which should be the next most familiar with the area and it's resources, and has the responsibility to make sure there are a reasonable amount of resources in the area and a plan with which to utilize them. The state governor also directs the national guard in that state to respond to emergencies. The state's efforts were an epic failure.
It was the federal government which had to step in and take over what should have been local and state operations that FEMA should have been helping to coordinate and provide resources for. Instead the federal government had to organize things almost at every level.
So the federal government stepped up and did a pretty good job of responding in a horrible situation where the local infrastructure and resources turned out to be if not useless, nearly so. What was done well at the local level was done by some extremely dedicated and overwhelmed individuals who should be incredibly proud of what the accomplished with what they had to work with.
However as a whole, New Orleans' and Louisiana's response was far worse than it should have been even considering the disaster they faced. It is not surprising that they couldn't handle a disaster of this size on their own, but it is appalling how little they were able to do on their own.
Houston took in the biggest share of the ‘refugees’- reported to be over 100,000, and got shot up and vandalized as payment for their efforts.
In other news a “Salon” liberal wrote up about his muggings, but of course never mentioning the race of the perps, other than that the liberal was not happy about NOLA returning to its pre-Katrina glory.
Why does the media focus on New Orleans,the eye of the storm hit Mississippi.
Who was the MSM reporter who started talking about McCarthy during one of his New Orleans Katrina reports? I thought it was really bizarre.
And although you'd never know it by watching media coverage on each Katrina anniversary, so have the majority of the citizens of New Orleans.
While that may be true, we have a butt load of "Katrina victims" STILL living in Houston FEMA trailers - after FIVE friggin' YEARS !
How about taking 'em back ?
Those who have not returned for the most part have not done so because they can't afford to return. They don't have the money to rebuild and the rents are much higher than before the storm.
I was in a hotel room in Birmingham Alabama with my family watching the aftermath of Katrina unfold on CNN when Governor Perry announced that he was taking many refugees from the storm. I looked at my daughter, shook my head and said,"I'm afraid that's one decision he'll come to regret." That comment was mean of me but, in my defense, I was very tired and extremely worried about what I was seeing on television. Your governor was being a true Christian. I'm truly sorry that things have worked out the way they have and that the good people of Texas have suffered because of it.
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