Gotta love this guy

With all the moaning and wailing still going on about the “slow Federal response to Katrina”, ya gotta love Gen. Honore, the straight-talking no-nonsense guy who is in charge of the National Guard troops in New Orleans. As Hurricane Rita approached, he was trying to deal with the new problems this second hurricane could create. Yet, reporters still wanted to focus on what went wrong the last time. His reply to the persistent questions from reporters focused on the past rather than the immediate needs of the present was classic: “What are you… stuck on stupid?” CLASSIC!

The problem is that many on the Left and their accomplices in the press are exactly that. Check out: Stuck on Stupid.

Katrina and 9/11

James Robbins makes this excellent contrast:

The public debate over the response to Hurricane Katrina has shown an appalling and disturbing lack of common purpose and of civility. There is always a place for legitimate criticism of government actions; in the fullness of time, when the facts have been gathered, conducting a sober and constructive review seeking less to place blame than to provide lessons for the future. Instead, we have seen something wholly counterproductive, an outpouring of virulence, vindictiveness, even hatred.

Katrina has become for the critics what 9/11 could not be, what they wanted Iraq to be, the vessel into which they have poured all their frustrations for a broad assault on the president. The disaster has not only been used as a means of criticizing FEMA and the department of Homeland Security — which at least were involved in the crisis — but has also been used to indict the Bush administration’s views on the environment, taxes, stem-cell research, health care, race, military recruitment, the Supreme Court, labor outsourcing, and AIDS in Africa. To their ultimate shame, the Democrats have even exploited the disaster for partisan fundraising. Ironically, the people who have most feared that President Bush is seeking to be a dictator are now complaining that he did not act enough like one.

The 9/11 attacks became a great unifying event. Americans pulled together for a common purpose, and in the years since have done remarkable things. The response to Hurricane Katrina could have been an opportunity for another show of national unity, but instead has descended into a sad and shameful spectacle, a maelstrom of malice.

Read the rest of the article here: Into the Maelstrom

Interesting…

Here’s a very interesting discussion of how LOCAL officials in the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana have been warned about precisely the type of problems which occurred with Hurricane Katrina and did nothing…

Ghost Plan for a Ghost Town

Gee, ya know, somehow it’s still just gotta be Bush’s fault, doesn’t it…?

Rank opportunism

Like most Americans, I have been overwhelmed by the magnitude of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. It is gut-wrenching to see the pictures of human beings groping amidst the rubble trying to find food, water and other necessities of life.

However, I am also beginning to become angered by the Monday morning quarterbacking of so many of the leftist critics of the President. No cheap shot seems to be out of bounds. No wild charge is seen to be too far…(Witness Kanye West’s idiotic rantings as part of the relief fundraiser on NBC last night!)

No one on the Left seems to have the decency to wait for the facts to be established. No, it’s open season on the President… seemingly for merely continuing to draw breath.

Here is David Frum’s blog posting which encapsulates this perfectly:
SEP. 2, 2005: UNFINEST HOUR

I haven’t posted much on the New Orleans disaster. There are so many people on the spot, adding so much to genuine understanding, that it seemed an absurd waste of your time for me to add my distant words. Tonight though I was invited by the BBC to talk about the political fall-out from Katrina with Sidney Blumenthal. To prepare, I spent some hours immersing myself in the catalogue of left-wing attacks on the Bush administration.

Now let me declare at the onset: Katrina has obviously not been the finest hour of American emergency management. There may well be fault on the part of the federal government and this administration. I’m certainly open to evidence on that point.

But to review the wild, contradictory, and utterly opportunistic charges from the administration’s critics is to enter a realm of madness. Some patient bloggers are responding to the charges one by one. Here is a post in reply to the charge that the levees were somehow neglected. Here is an accounting for the Louisiana National Guard: 8,000 of whom remain on duty in-state, including the Guard’s most pertinent engineer group, numbering four battalions.

Here is a crushing reply to those who blame the Bush administration for hurricanes – when hurricane activity has in fact dropped since 1940. Here is one of many stories detailing how the notorious New Orleans police force led the breakdown of civic order. (For those who deplore the sharp drop-off in the flow of federal funds to Louisiana since 1999, here is a link to one important explanation: the resignation of former Speaker of the House and Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston [R., La.] after Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine threatened to publish details of Livingston’s marital infidelity, in order to punish Republicans for the then-looming impeachment of Bill Clinton on perjury charges.)

And yet … and yet … is all this really necessary? The time will come, and come very soon, when the great self-critical mechanisms of American society and government will go to work to study what went wrong. Those who deserve blame will get blame in plenty then. But now – with the dead still uncounted and unburied, with the living still struggling for refuge and help, is there not something indecent about the haste with which the American left avidly tries to turn this terrible disaster to political account?

Is there not something bizarre about their willingness to fire off accusation after accusation, each contradicting the last? The disaster was caused by the Bush administration’s failure to protect the environment from global warming …. no, no, it was caused by the administration’s refusal to manipulate the environment by funding more levees to control the Mississippi River …. it’s Iraq, no it’s budget cuts, no it’s wetlands, and on and on and on.

Good God, what is wrong with these people? Will they ever learn to see somebody else’s misfortune as something more than their political opportunity?

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour is right. This tragedy is bringing out the worst in many people. And I wonder, as I watch the volunteers cooking food for the houseless in the Houston Astrodome, or supplies being delivered by rescue workers who are living in cars because there is no place else for them, or the elderly being hoisted to safety – I wonder: why at a moment like this can we not live up to their generous spirit. Why can’t we act first, investigate afterward, and let blame and credit be apportioned as they are due, when they are due?