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Hurricane Katrina was barely beyond New Orleans and the Mississippi coast when the strident voices of the Angry Left began screaming that the death and destruction were the fault of President Bush, Gov. Haley Barbour and White Americas racism.
Disaster brings out the best and the worst in people and the former was vividly on display as helicopter crews bravely plucked desperate people from roofs, bus caravans ferried exhausted refugees to safe havens across the South and Americans everywhere began pouring out a veritable torrent of dollars to help the needy.
But thats not what the Left wanted us to see.
For the editors of The Washington Post, for example, Katrina proved White Americas racism remains, creating in the storms aftermath a mass of desperate-looking Black folk on the run in the Deep South. Some without shoes. Such was the lead in a front-page story headlined To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked.
Watching the stream of television images of refugees stranded in the Superdome and along stretches of Interstate 10, Post reporter Wil Haygood found no escaping that race had become a subtext to the unfolding drama of the hurricanes aftermath.
No matter that the Black family Haygood profiled said they had been passed over by a helicopter from a Black National Guard unit. The incident demonstrated for Haygood that in the South, the issue of race black, white always seems ready to come rolling off the tongue as a summer whistle.
A similar obsession was evident in the Friday morning WTOP radio remarks of Hardball host Chris Matthews. The former flak for Jimmy Carter, Tip ONeill and Ed Muskie said his weekend show would focus on Katrina and its aftermath: Its not a nice topic, its about race, you know, its about class, its about poverty, its about screw-ups, its not a happy topic.
Other voices on the Angry Left pointed to opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and other anti-global warming measures by President Bush and Barbour when he was Republican National Committee Chairman.
The hurricane that struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming, said The Boston Globes Ross Gelspan in a column appearing in The International Herald Tribune, owned by The New York Times.
We have global warming because in 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when George W. Bush was elected president - and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies, said Gelspan.
On Ariana Huffingtons blog, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed to Barbour: As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippis Gulf Coast, its worth recalling the central role that [Barbour] played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol Now we are all learning what its like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged.
Then there was Swing State Projects Bob Brigham who seemed to think Bush purposely left New Orleans vulnerable: For most of Bushs time as president, FEMA has been saying this could be the deadliest scenario facing America. And Bush cut the preparedness funding, sent our strategic reserve National Guard troops to fight an unnecessary war and then went on vacation. Not only is Bush the worst president ever, but he is a total ahole for f---king over New Orleans.
These are just a few and not even the worst examples compiled by blogger Arthur Chrenkoff of the Angry Lefts blind rage and hatred for Bush, Republican leaders like Barbour and White Americans in general. Call them the Always Hate America crowd.
Maybe the intensity of their hate and rage prevents these poor souls from seeing the facts about global warming and hurricanes. They tell us global warming is causing more and stronger hurricanes than ever before. The truth is, as TechCentralStations James Glassman points out, we have had fewer hurricanes in recent years than in previous decades and they are weaker. Just check out this table on the National Hurricane Center web site.
As for race, speaking as an Oklahoman living in Maryland and with ancestors from Texas, Tennessee and Virginia, I know only too well about the legacy of slavery. I also know that in my 55 years in this great nation Ive seen in the America of 2005 the emergence of arguably the least prejudiced nation on earth. So why can the Angry Left only see the dead hand of the past?
