It is widely believed that George Herbert Walker Bush lost the presidency in large part because of his administration's pitiful failure to provide meaningful relief in the face of Hurricane Andrew.
How history repeats itself.
The outrage many feel in the face of an even more pitiful effort to relieve suffering in the wake of Katrina is not the sort of thing voters tend to forget. It's possible to bamboozle your constituents into supporting an unjust war, if you play your cards just right. After all, you can make sure nobody ever sees the thousands of coffins containing what used to be American youth and idealism. And if you talk about weapons of mass des--umm, "liberation"--often enough and loud enough, then hey, some people are bound to listen, aren't they?
But, boy George! it's hard to equivocate your way out of leaving poor black people who didn't vote for you to die.
And let's not gild the lily. That's exactly what Bush did.
Hurricane protection funding to Louisiana has been cut almost in half since 2001. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was once a prominent and very-well-funded government organization, charged with keeping the United States afloat in the event of nuclear attack. After 9/11, it was subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security and it had its funding repeatedly slashed.
Daddy Bush, in a rare concession to the environmental lobby, enacted legislation to protect the wetlands along the Gulf Coast. This policy was bolstered by President Clinton. Bush Junior overturned it all in 2003, allowing developers to rush in and remake the land in their own moneyed image. This is important because every two miles of wetland along the Gulf Coast decreases a storm surge by half a foot. A study came out in 2004 claiming that without wetland protection, New Orleans could be devatated by a relatively mild Category 1 or 2 hurricane. The Chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study, saying "everyone loves what we're doing".
And it's not as if nobody saw Katrina coming. In October 2004, National Geographic did everything but name the storm, saying tens of thousands would die and the city would be completely paralyzed. As my previous entry noted, New Orleans has been the victim of many hurricanes over the years.
But hey, Orleans county was the only one in Louisiana to vote strongly for Kerry. So at least Bush can be comforted by the removal of thousands of Democrat-leaning voters from the rolls.
"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence... I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich." -- Congressman Charles B. Rangel
"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response... I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out." -- Rev. Jesse Jackson
"In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty."-- David Gonzalez, NY Times
Don't let anybody try to tell you this isn't a racial issue. The truth is there for all to see, in black and...well, mostly black.
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