Post Katrina, Homer Nods

William F. Buckley, Jr. wipes the floor with the Lefty notion that poverty is a root cause of anything:

A lead columnist in the New York Times explains the real meaning of the Katrina catastrophe.

Poverty.

Mr. Nicholas Kristof tells us that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. "Under Mr. Bush, the national infant mortality rate has risen for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant morality. So" — Reader: brace yourself — "in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations."

The social diagnostician gets right to the meat of what Mr. Bush did to generate the horrors of New Orleans. The Bush administration "has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent. It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children."

That diagnosis is so drenched in balderdash it almost defies analysis. Let it rest that gross spending under Bush, and excluding Iraq, is the highest in U.S. history. And if New Orleans was short of vaccinations, why didn't the Democratic mayor, congressmen, and governor complain about it?

Advancing this argument also puts the lie to the Left's claims to support the underprivileged. After all, if the root cause of crime is poverty, they're indicting poor people as criminals. Tell that to Bernie Ebbers, Martha Stewart, and Andrew Fastow.

When they're not blaming the disaster on poverty (and Americans' alleged indifference to it, despite spending trillions of dollars in the War on Poverty), the Left cries racism, as Mark Goldblatt notes:

One of the more despicable motifs sounded by left-of-center commentators in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina took the form of a question: If the majority of the victims in New Orleans had been white rather than black, would the federal response have been swifter and more decisive? This isn’t a real question, of course, but a rhetorical question, a cheap attempt to score political points, since the person doing the asking already knows, or thinks he knows, the correct answer: Well, obviously, the federal response would have been more efficient if the majority of the victims had been white . . . because President Bush is a closet racist who doesn’t mind watching black people suffering and dying.

Such venomous insinuating, in a sense, follows a familiar liberal pattern — namely, it presupposes the ability of the president’s opponents to set aside his actual words and peer into his soul to determine his true motivation. So, for example, even though Bush publicly declared that all detainees held by the United States during the war on Islamic terror should be treated humanely, and even though he privately sent a memo to his Joint Chiefs of Staff stating that detainees must be treated humanely, in his heart of hearts he knew and approved of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In a similar vein, then, we hear Bob Herbert of the New York Times insisting that the demographics of Katrina’s victims caused Bush to ignore them: “He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.”

It’s ugly, it’s unsupportable, but at least Herbert comes out and says it.

Yup, racism caused this disaster. It clearly caused New Orleans and Lousiana voters to elect the biggest and most worthless, incompetent hacks to major political positions. It caused these fools to spend gobs and gobs of taxpayer dollars on handouts to the indolent instead of raising levees or cleaning the thugs out of the neighborhoods they terrorized.

Deroy Murdock further crushes this pathetic excuse for an argument:

Like New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and FEMA director Michael Brown, President Bush must explain why, for three to four days, no one could manage at least to air drop bottled water and granola bars on thousands of Katrina survivors who baked under temperatures exceeding 90 degrees at the Crescent City’s Superdome, its convention center, and freeway overpasses in the central business district.

While he must answer for that and other badly dropped balls, Bush need not apologize for being fueled by bigotry during last week’s “inadequate” federal response, as he described it.

This charge crumbles on first inspection.

George W. Bush is a politician with a very ambitious agenda. Does Randall Robinson really believe that Bush thinks it would be easier to persuade Congress to reform Social Security if he merely arranged to deny poor, beleaguered blacks food and water for over half a week?

Does Elijah Cummings truly believe that Bush thinks it would encourage the Senate to confirm his judicial appointees if he ordered FEMA to conduct slow-motion rescues of elderly black ladies from their attics?

Does Kanye West actually believe that Bush eagerly anticipated televised images of parched, screaming black babies as a public-diplomacy tool to boost European and Middle Eastern support for U.S. policy in Iraq and the Arab world?

These men probably think Bush is not so bright, but do they honestly believe he is that stupid? Or do they sincerely believe that Bush — who has appointed not one but two black secretaries of state — is so consumed by racism that he would jeopardize his domestic and foreign agendas for the brief pleasure of watching black Americans broil, as if in a skillet?

Given the stunning cloudburst of philanthropy now raining on Katrina’s survivors (a reported $487 million in donations as of Monday, private-sector job offers for many evacuees, free housing granted to others, etc.), do these racial demagogues, in fact, believe that Bush expected most Americans to share his alleged glee at black suffering? And if not, why would Bush isolate himself politically and personally in such a counterproductive, not to mention hideous, manner?

Noemie Emery wonders why Houston and New Orleans followed such different trajectories.

Michael Novak discovers something interesting about Katrina's victims:

In the future, city planners should carefully count in advance the numbers of persons who fall in this demographic when they formulate evacuation plans. Female householders all by themselves with children or over 65 are statistically likely to be severely disadvantaged in thinking about options for the future, disadvantaged in not having the means to determine their own destiny, and disadvantaged with respect to the habits of mind that accustom them to taking charge of their own future. Special provision will need to be made for helping them. They are likely to be accustomed to being taken care of by the state.

The younger mothers among them have been abandoned by those they should have been able to count on, the males in their lives. The over-65s (in urban areas) are likely to be totally dependent on Social Security and other government benefits, without private pensions or homeownership of their own. In emergencies, such persons need someone else to take care of them. It is wrong to throw them, at this point, solely on their own resources. Some will be able to manage that, but by no means all.

Is this not what our eyes are showing us among those who failed to evacuate in time? To be sure, thousands of those taking refuge are men, and some are married couples, and some are white, Hispanic, or Asian. More research could show that my own hypotheses — and even visual observations — are wrong. But the Census data helps explain to me what my eyes are seeing.

Another question that bothers me: I would also really like to know what happened to the better-off blacks and whites of New Orleans, who escaped before the storm hit. How many have lost their homes? How many have loved ones still unaccounted for?

What are things now like in those lovely suburbs around New Orleans?

It is not only those who did not evacuate in time that seem to have suffered horribly. I would love to see more reporting about the middle class — and sympathy for them, too. They are Katrina's victims, too.

James G. Poulos takes an interesting tack:

WE MUST UNACCUSTOM ourselves to the idea of major cities as sinkholes to be skirted. Like everything else, the barbarification of urban America is a national security issue -- because, like everything else, at is core national security is an issue of law and order. Americans -- the privileged and the disaffected alike -- can endure great pressures, and retain a noble spirit. But the suddenness of a breakdown in infrastructure that strips a city's people of drinking water, electricity, and security is sufficient to break the levee that keeps police in place instead of soldiers.

It is too late to prevent that damage from being done in, done to, New Orleans. But it is not too late -- yet -- to galvanize Homeland Security. It's not too late to remind some that a vast influx of illegal immigrants will only exacerbate an already dangerous propertyless, unenfranchised underclass, nor is it too late to remind others that we can no longer afford to leave Americans already here to sink or swim, en masse, on their own. The implications of New Orleans reach to every corner of American domestic policy. Unfortunate as it is, the challenge of our time is to confront and repulse the fear and consequence of random catastrophe. Never before has it been easier to touch one off by man-made means, and, now, as New Orleans has shown us, we appear singularly unprepared to deal with the human effects of disorder. Evacuation plans may work just as well in the case of a sudden attack as those that removed most people from harm's way long before Katrina made landfall -- but in every case, some will remain behind. Some will stay out of the kind of weakness that merits sympathy, others not -- but the loss, the very real and momentous loss of a major city, will remain.

This is a tragedy akin to the fall of Troy.

We simply can't trust the Left Wing Media and Democrat politicians to be our Homer.