The levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and what many had feared finally happened: a huge, cascading, imagination-numbing, civilization-submerging deluge of…blather from the left about how the flooding of New Orleans is All George W. Bush’s Fault.
The beautiful city of New Orleans is in deadly crisis, its terrified residents deprived of food, water, power, their homes, and in many sad cases, their loved ones–and what do we hear from our liberal brothers and sisters but carping about the various ways in which the uncaring policies of the Evil One caused this fearful natural disaster.
The lowest point was surely this item by the Huffington Puffington Post’s Bob Cesca showing a photo of My Pet Goat supposedly strumming his guitar like Nero while New Orleans drowned. The only problem: the photo was taken an hour and a half before the bursting of the Mississippi River levees that precipitated the flooding. (Hat tip to Moxie.)
Also on the HuffPost, Russell Shaw airs the popular-with-liberals theory that Hurricane Katrina was a product of global warming. Shaw doesn’t actually blame George Bush for this–he blames Ronald Reagan:
“Still I am wondering if those voters in Louisiana and Mississippi who helped polluter-allied Reagan win in 1980 would have found themselves fated differently under a second Carter term. If Carter came in, we could have had an alternative fuels program and tighter auto emission standards in effect by now.
“Sparked by his prodding, we might have had decades of global warming controls in place.
“Whose to say if those steps might not have rendered the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf even 1/100th of a degree cooler than they are now?”
Alas for Russell, even the New York Times, quoting a raft of scientists, has dismissed the global warming theory as hooey (hat tip: Instapundit). (Jim Glassman also has a good debunking take on this on Tech Central Station.)
And the mother of all unhinged anti-Bush ideologues, Cindy Sheehan, has weighed in (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt):
“Well, George and I are leaving Crawford today. George is finished playing golf and telling his fables in San Diego, so he will be heading to Louisiana to see the devastation that his environmental policies and his killing policies have caused. Recovery would be easier and much quicker if almost ½ of the three states involved National Guard were not in Iraq. All of the National Guard’s equipment is in Iraq also. Plus, with the 2 billion dollars a week that the private contractors are siphoning from our treasury, how are we going to pay for helping our own citizens in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama? And, should I dare say ‘global warming?’ and be branded as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on top of everything else the reich-wingers say about me.”
(And don’t miss Cindy’s long list of gushing tributes to her pals at MoveOn.org, Air America, Daily Kos, and the Israel Delenda Est crowd at the Crawford Peace House.)
Then there’s Sidney Blumenthal at Salon (you have to pay or sit through mind-pickling ads for this). His theory that Bush should have used the money spent on the war in Iraq handing out big federal grants to shore up the Mississippi levees (wasn’t that the state of Louisiana’s responsibility?):
“In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut the Corps of Engineers’ request for holding back the waters of New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans levees, but it was too late.”
And finally, we have Josh Marshall:
“I know we’re supposed to be observing an accountability free moment for the president. But there are just too many examples out there of the ways in which his policies have contributed to and accentuated this crisis: systematic cuts in levee and pump construction around New Orleans…, phasing out FEMA and the apparently the whole concept of national coordination of the response to natural disasters.”
Fortunately, there are a few sane souls on the left who actually view the flooding of New Orleans (and the Katrina devastation in Mississippi and Alabama) as a disaster instead of a harvest-field for Bush-bashing). Blogger Skippy makes this plea:
“this is not about red states v. blue states…this is not about left v. right…this is not about liberal v. conservative…
“the people in louisiana, mississippi and alabama are americans. this is about america. and americans have historically always rolled up their sleeves and pitched in to help out their fellow countrymen in need.”
And that’s exactly right: Hundreds of thousands of desperate people need our help. Click to these posts on Instapundit and Little Green Footballs for long lists of links to dozens of charities, from the Red Cross to church and synagogue groups that are helping with flood relief and need your money. This is America’s tsunami–and it’s another chance for Americans to demonstrate their unparalleled generosity.