Not much traction with the abuse�-�Nation/Politics�-�The Washington Times, America's Newspaper
That's Washington Times Editor Wesley Pruden on the New Orleans subject. He says TWO THOUSAND buses sit unused in four feet of water in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool.
You figure, even if you only cram 50 people on a bus and only make one trip, that's 100,000 people...pretty much the exact count of how many stayed behind. As for the question of who would drive them, in my youth we had a church bus in our tiny town, and a school bus for the tiny Fascist School I attended. (I refuse to call it a Christian school, as Christ had very little to do with it and doesn't deserve the blame.) In both cases, people with no more experience than driving a pickup truck handled the buses just fine on the open road.
The path to rescuing every person left in New Orleans sat at Ray Nagin's feet...and he chose to ignore them, waiting for the feds to bail him out.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Fear & Loathing In New Orleans
Fear & Loathing In New Orleans
They were somewhere around Baton Rouge, on the edge of the swamp…
…hey, wait a second, that’s not how it goes.
But it could, if good old Mayor Ray Nagin gets his way. See, his long-suffering police force is really stressed out. You know, the ones abandoning their posts, looting, etc. To reward them, he’s giving many of them (as well as firefighters and EMTs) five-day vacations to Las Vegas. Effective immediately. As in, today.
I’ll pause while the sheer intellectual weight of that comes to bear on your astonished mind.
It’s all right here, in black and white. Yes, the good Mayor says they’ve been under a lot of stress in the last week, so he wants to ‘cater to them.’ He says there are enough national guard units now that they can take a break.
While I don’t want to malign those civil servants who actually did their jobs in the last week, I think that may be the most repugnant thing I’ve ever read. It’s been a week. One week. Seven days. These men were asked to do their jobs, and only their jobs, under extreme duress for one week, and a big portion of them couldn’t even manage to do that. Current reports have over 500 (that’s something like 1/3) walking off the job. We have the chief of police complaining they had to work in wet shoes, and without proper bathroom facilities.
That chief had this to say on the subject of the trips:
‘His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process."
The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.
They said that they were trying to get the first officers on their way on Monday and that the first stop would be Baton Rouge, about 75 miles from here.’
Jump-start the healing process. Well, it’s good to know the fine city of New Orleans is in such capable hands. I think it’s important that a chief of police knows that his job when his city is in complete civil unrest and a total state of destruction is to make certain his law officers are well rested and ‘healed’ from their trauma.
He’s so sure of this plan, he plans to take a vacation as well! So does the head of Homeland Security for the city, the man in charge of the recovery effort. Check this out, and I defy you to do it without gagging on a sudden rise of bile.
‘Colonel Ebbert, the senior official running the recovery and rescue operation, and Mr. Compass both said that they planned to take a break as well, but probably for less than five days, and that they would continue to direct the recovery by telephone.
Officials said they expected the military, with much greater resources, to expand rescue work, begin cleaning up the city and take the first steps toward reconstruction.’
Well, it’s good to know they won’t take the whole five days. I mean, after all, they’re just leading the rescue and recovery effort of their entire city, I hope that only three or four days of rest and relaxation in Las Vegas will jump-start their personal healing process. We can’t have our vital civic leaders stressed out or unrested! No sir!
Of course, all of this shores up every single thing I’ve been saying. They make it clear with their own words: they fully expect the feds to do EVERYTHING. The military will do the rescue and recovery, they will begin cleaning the city, they’ll police the city, they’ll fight fires and perform medical response service, they’ll even start the reconstruction!
I think the good Mr. Nagin should be forced to spend his five day vacation in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool (name stolen from the brilliant Bill Whittle), personally cleaning and restoring every single one of the reportedly 400-500 busses he failed to use to evacuate his own people, enough to EMPTY the Superdome before it became the Thunderdome minus Mad Max and Tina Turner.
I tell you, my friends, I hope the officials and civil servants of New Orleans enjoy their vacation. As they keep hanging themselves in the press, the word will eventually leak out despite the mainstream media’s attempts to completely ignore their culpability and instead pursue the ‘everything is Bush’s fault’ line of hogwash. Once that word is out there, Ma and Pa Kettle in flyover country will be joined by John and Jackie Liberal in Manhattan as they wholeheartedly cry for the heads of these men to be posted on the outskirts of the city on long poles, as a warning to the others.
They were somewhere around Baton Rouge, on the edge of the swamp…
…hey, wait a second, that’s not how it goes.
But it could, if good old Mayor Ray Nagin gets his way. See, his long-suffering police force is really stressed out. You know, the ones abandoning their posts, looting, etc. To reward them, he’s giving many of them (as well as firefighters and EMTs) five-day vacations to Las Vegas. Effective immediately. As in, today.
I’ll pause while the sheer intellectual weight of that comes to bear on your astonished mind.
It’s all right here, in black and white. Yes, the good Mayor says they’ve been under a lot of stress in the last week, so he wants to ‘cater to them.’ He says there are enough national guard units now that they can take a break.
While I don’t want to malign those civil servants who actually did their jobs in the last week, I think that may be the most repugnant thing I’ve ever read. It’s been a week. One week. Seven days. These men were asked to do their jobs, and only their jobs, under extreme duress for one week, and a big portion of them couldn’t even manage to do that. Current reports have over 500 (that’s something like 1/3) walking off the job. We have the chief of police complaining they had to work in wet shoes, and without proper bathroom facilities.
That chief had this to say on the subject of the trips:
‘His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process."
The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.
They said that they were trying to get the first officers on their way on Monday and that the first stop would be Baton Rouge, about 75 miles from here.’
Jump-start the healing process. Well, it’s good to know the fine city of New Orleans is in such capable hands. I think it’s important that a chief of police knows that his job when his city is in complete civil unrest and a total state of destruction is to make certain his law officers are well rested and ‘healed’ from their trauma.
He’s so sure of this plan, he plans to take a vacation as well! So does the head of Homeland Security for the city, the man in charge of the recovery effort. Check this out, and I defy you to do it without gagging on a sudden rise of bile.
‘Colonel Ebbert, the senior official running the recovery and rescue operation, and Mr. Compass both said that they planned to take a break as well, but probably for less than five days, and that they would continue to direct the recovery by telephone.
Officials said they expected the military, with much greater resources, to expand rescue work, begin cleaning up the city and take the first steps toward reconstruction.’
Well, it’s good to know they won’t take the whole five days. I mean, after all, they’re just leading the rescue and recovery effort of their entire city, I hope that only three or four days of rest and relaxation in Las Vegas will jump-start their personal healing process. We can’t have our vital civic leaders stressed out or unrested! No sir!
Of course, all of this shores up every single thing I’ve been saying. They make it clear with their own words: they fully expect the feds to do EVERYTHING. The military will do the rescue and recovery, they will begin cleaning the city, they’ll police the city, they’ll fight fires and perform medical response service, they’ll even start the reconstruction!
I think the good Mr. Nagin should be forced to spend his five day vacation in the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool (name stolen from the brilliant Bill Whittle), personally cleaning and restoring every single one of the reportedly 400-500 busses he failed to use to evacuate his own people, enough to EMPTY the Superdome before it became the Thunderdome minus Mad Max and Tina Turner.
I tell you, my friends, I hope the officials and civil servants of New Orleans enjoy their vacation. As they keep hanging themselves in the press, the word will eventually leak out despite the mainstream media’s attempts to completely ignore their culpability and instead pursue the ‘everything is Bush’s fault’ line of hogwash. Once that word is out there, Ma and Pa Kettle in flyover country will be joined by John and Jackie Liberal in Manhattan as they wholeheartedly cry for the heads of these men to be posted on the outskirts of the city on long poles, as a warning to the others.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Ben Stein's Wisdom
Ben Stein’s Wisdom
Once again, Ben Stein unleashes his gi-normous brain on us and proceeds to out-think most of the country.
In this short piece, he lays out everything I’ve already said and more. I’m telling you people, this is where the event is heading, whether anyone likes it or not. Negligence of a criminal stature was absolutely perpetrated in the days surrounding Katrina, but NOT by the Bush administration.
The media is, big surprise, lying to us. Intentionally glancing over the very, very obvious problems on the ground in Nola before and immediately following the storm while focusing exclusively on any anti-Bush story that comes up, even when the source for that story is someone who has a vested interest in seeing to it that all blame for the problems shifts north to the Feds and doesn’t get anywhere near them.
Read Ben’s piece and chew on it awhile. Even if you’re a staunch Bushitler moveon.org automaton, I defy you to refute the very simple, elegant logic contained in it.
Once again, Ben Stein unleashes his gi-normous brain on us and proceeds to out-think most of the country.
In this short piece, he lays out everything I’ve already said and more. I’m telling you people, this is where the event is heading, whether anyone likes it or not. Negligence of a criminal stature was absolutely perpetrated in the days surrounding Katrina, but NOT by the Bush administration.
The media is, big surprise, lying to us. Intentionally glancing over the very, very obvious problems on the ground in Nola before and immediately following the storm while focusing exclusively on any anti-Bush story that comes up, even when the source for that story is someone who has a vested interest in seeing to it that all blame for the problems shifts north to the Feds and doesn’t get anywhere near them.
Read Ben’s piece and chew on it awhile. Even if you’re a staunch Bushitler moveon.org automaton, I defy you to refute the very simple, elegant logic contained in it.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Lighting Up New Orleans
Lighting Up New Orleans
I realize I haven’t been doing my job with this blog. It appears that one of the primary purposes of blogging is to get people all riled up and irritated. It’s called ‘drama’, from what I’m told, and I’ve been far short of my required amount.
I imagine this little post about the tragedy of New Orleans should bring my controversy-o-meter up to standard blogging levels. If not, hell, maybe there are more people out there with critical thinking brains than I believe.
I’m going to say something here that a lot of people don’t want to hear. It’s the truth, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear it. I’m going to break down the catastrophe from its early warning stages to it’s current state of medieval chaos and mayhem. In doing so, I’m going to drag some stinking, rotting elephant carcasses out from under our proverbial living room rug and wave them in your faces so we can all discuss this in a realistic manner and dismiss the verbal fecal matter flying around regarding it.
New Orleans has something like 500,000 people. Those 500,000 people were warned of the storm a good 48 hours before landfall, which happened in the pre-dawn hours of Monday, the 29th. According to reports on CNN, as early as Saturday the 27th, as many as 100,000 of these people, a full 20%, didn’t have the resources to leave. A woman is quoted as saying ‘if you have no money, you can’t go.’ By Sunday morning, President Bush had declared Louisiana an emergency area. Mayor Nagin was already discussing a ‘mandatory’ evacuation on Saturday, and declared one on Sunday despite the fact that the ‘mandatory’ part was unenforceable.
Now we all know what has happened since. The storm hit. The ‘worst’ didn’t happen, the storm blew well enough east to spare New Orleans the leading edge and the worst wind damage. On Tuesday, the first levee was breached, and the waters began to rise at an alarming rate. This is generally when everything went to hell. It’s been hell since, and I’ll skip past all the sordid tales of chaos and inhumanity for now.
Let’s start back at the beginning. 100,000 people could not leave? Does anyone actually believe that number is anywhere near accurate? Last I checked, people have legs, and if people want to go somewhere, they go. (My apologies to those without legs, but I do assume you have some sort of wheeled device that someone with legs could use to get you to safety.) This is where the lines began to be drawn by many: rich and poor. You see, New Orleans has a poverty level of around 20%, so they’re suggesting here that the city’s poor simply couldn’t afford to leave town and escape the hurricane.
And here we have our first terribly inflammatory statement: I’d say that number and statement, that around 100,000 couldn’t leave, is some of that unmitigated verbal fecal matter I mentioned earlier. That’s right, here we go, boys and girls, down that dark, nasty alley called reality and reason. I would suggest that there were potential routes of escape for the vast majority of those who stayed. However, as early as Saturday, in the midst of this talk of ‘mandatory’ evacuation, we have the vocal, public plan to use the Superdome as a place for those who can’t leave. We aren’t talking bedridden people in hospitals, we’re talking about people able to cross town and get into the stadium…but not out of the city, apparently.
Michelle Malkin was linking to bloggers discussing the sheer stupidity of this idea over the weekend, before the storm hit. How it holds 40,000 people, but only has backup power for lights and no environmental controls, how the bathrooms would be the first casualty of flooding, how there was a complete lack of food and supplies…you get the idea. And yet, here are somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 people (depending on what source you heed) showing up with the clothes on their backs.
I’d like to jump in here at this point and let the cat out of the bag a little early. I’m going further on this, but for those who aren’t on board yet, I want to stop the train and allow for easier boarding.
What do we have here? We have a bunch of people who are confident that government will protect them. There’s absolutely no sense of self-preservation here at all. If I’m leaving my house with the knowledge that it will likely not be there when I return, with the knowledge that the city could be underwater in less than 24 hours, I think I’m coming with more than my clothes and my favorite blankey. Let’s press forward, there’s a trail here to follow and we’re just beginning.
The flooding starts, conditions at the Superdome (and everywhere else) deteriorate, looting begins, people start dying by the dozen, the shooting starts, things go thoroughly apocalyptic. Relief isn’t immediate, from what we read and hear. People start going a little mad, trying to hijack helicopters and whatnot. The whole thing starts to look like a Romero movie, but a little darker and more violent. And that brings us to now.
Mayor Nagin, a man who seemed to be handling things well in the beginning, begins to crack. The headlines all report his latest public appearance, a tearful outburst over the lack of federal help. Giuliani, this man is not. Never saw Rudy simpering over public airwaves that those big meanies in Washington weren’t sending stuff down fast enough.
It all seems to solid, doesn’t it? A mayor trying to save his city, a people abandoned in their hour of need, the constant reminder that, apparently, the majority of the stranded are not Caucasian…such terrible, tragic stuff. Bad President, BAD. No donut for you.
Ah, but there’s that alley again, and it’s getting darker by the minute. How about this picture, hosted on Yahoo with absolutely no fanfare, but unearthed by Drudge? That’s about a hundred busses, maybe more. The good Mr. Nagin couldn’t scrape together 100 people capable of driving a school bus to evacuate the Superdome before the storm hit? Or, even in lieu of that, move the busses out of the path of destruction so that they could be used to shuttle people out once the worst passed?
What about city busses? What about police vehicles? What about just about anything other than providing ‘shelters’ that were very, very clearly not shelter at all?
Now we have wonderful folks like Jesse Jackson Jr. and Kanye West proclaiming that this has something to do with the color of the people who are currently stranded in these ‘shelters’. Well, considering the good Mayor Nagin is the same color as those people, I’d say there are some questions to be asked about how seriously Mr. Mandatory Evacuation was taking things in the hours leading up to the storm. His pleas only achieved 80% of the city to leave, at BEST estimates. The 20% that remain are supposedly poor people of his own racial background. We have evidence that not nearly enough was done to help actually get those people out once they made the fatal mistake of ‘riding it out’. To top it all off, he provides ‘shelters’ WITHIN the zone of absolute greatest danger, completely undercutting his own ‘mandatory’ evacuation.
Unfortunately, this is the liberal mindset’s most deadly illustration to date. These people were convinced that Mother Government would save them, provide them shelter, keep them warm and fed. Today we have quotes from people still in the city complaining that they just have cold MRE’s from the National Guard to eat, and not warm meals. We have reports that the Guard was greeted by many who applauded, but some who jeered and said the whole city should be burned down for leaving them behind.
Denied the teat that they were convinced was theirs, they wail like any baby who doesn’t get a bottle when he wants it.
Wow, that’s a harsh thing to say about people who have been living in these conditions, Justin, you’re really just a callous bastard, aren’t you?
No, I’m out here living in reality. The real world. (Well, as close to it as one can come out here in Aztlan.) Everyone seems to want to cling to this fantasy world where some higher human power, some organization paid for by taxpayer dollars, will swoop in and carry them all away to someplace warm and safe.
Guess what, brothers and sisters, I am here today to tell you that storytime is over, the great governmental Prince Charming is not coming to save you, and the only way you will live happily ever after is by God’s good grace and your own diligence and hard work.
You have a liberal Democrat mayor clearly not doing everything logically possible to save his city, then crying on the radio when the feds can’t save it fast enough for him.
You have a small portion of a great city so foolish and blinded by decades of lies that they believe staying in a gigantic punchbowl is a good and safe idea when a gigantic faucet is headed their way.
Bear in mind, only a portion of these potential 100,000 are included here. A number of them stayed very intentionally. They knew the city would be abandoned, and stayed to prey on the empty stores and streets, perpetrating just about every crime you could imagine. These are the people that don’t need rescuing, society needs to be rescued from them.
But I digress. My point here isn’t that these people somehow deserve their fate, but we’re letting their plight sway our entire perception of this event. The reality is, the vast majority of New Orleans had the simple self-preservation instinct to leave before the storm hit. They were willing to do what it took to get themselves and their families out. These people bear the brunt of the tragedy, they left everything they had and sacrificed everything just to keep on living. They have the hope that everything will one day be okay again, and are willing to do whatever it took to protect their lives and those of their loved ones.
There are also a percentage that stayed, and are not suffering greatly. An excellent military blogger pointed out a fantastic blog run by some former military folks who stayed in New Orleans in their office building. They’re relatively self-sufficient, trying to help their fellow man, and above all are NOT sitting around complaining that the government didn’t do enough to get them out once they decided to stay. This proves that, with enough will and hard work, you could even stay and survive. On your own. Without once suckling at government’s teat.
So yes, the majority of New Orleans proved themselves to be smart, tenacious, and willing to do what it took to survive and carry on. What we have on the ground in NO at this point are a small majority very unhappy with how government has treated them. Yes, I know some had valid reasons why they couldn’t get out, but I am firmly convinced that number is very, very small.
All that said, I hope the best for everyone down there trapped in Fallujah West, even those who foolishly believed that their mayor or their president would swoop in, Superman-like, and save them from a catastrophe they all knew was coming. I’m not including the animals currently hunting in the city, for them all I wish is a large-caliber round somewhere vital and a sure, final end.
I do have to say that my limit for those blaming anyone but those who CHOSE to stay behind for their plight has been breached just as thoroughly as those levees. Huffington is hosting people claiming blacks are resorting to cannibalism to survive. Kanye West uses a telethon to benefit the city as a platform for declaring that Bush hates black people and that America is designed to help poor blacks last. RFK Jr. and oh-so-many pundits and armchair pundits are claiming this is, of course, Bushitler’s fault, either by Kyoto, or global warming, or his god-like mutant weather-controlling powers. Michael Moore is even chiming in, still bitching about Iraq, as if the problem here is that we have troops over there so we can’t help anyone here. These people have all, pardon the severe understatement, lost the plot.
I don’t have much of a voice here, but maybe some of you might agree with me and start spreading this line of thought to others, as inflammatory and non-warm-cuddly-fuzzy, to others. Let’s assign responsibility where it belongs: to the individual, not the insane and offensive Moonbat Whackjob Patrol’s list of most popular blame theories.
Most of all, let’s pray for and help those who did what they had to do to survive and left everything, every single thing they had, to make it through this alive. People camping on highways, staying with strangers, seeking shelter in cities thousands of miles away from their homes. The real absolute, total tragedy rests on their shoulders. If anyone will rebuild New Orleans and restore it to what it once was, it will assuredly be these people. Right now, they’re in a place so nightmarish it’s hard to even ponder. The American Dream for them has been simplified a great deal: don’t starve, don’t die, don’t let those around you die. We can help them, we can help the city, but all these smoke and mirrors focusing on a small portion of those who were failed by the pipe dreams of government-as-parent just isn’t fruitful in any way. The Guard is in, supplies are flowing, the dead will be collected and mourned, the water will drain away, everything will slowly start returning to normal. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these people we see so much of on the news, the ones who chose to stay based on government’s promises of safety, those people will likely continue on in their delusions. People with that mindset don’t rebuild cities, they wait for government (and the tax money of others) to do it for them. People with that mindset don’t build much of anything, because their sense of entitlement has been inflated to the point of no return.
We must support those who lack that sense, who instead possess another sense: the common variety. Let’s help them work, let’s help them be safe, let’s join together as a nation and heal the gaping wound carved into us by Katrina. My only plea is that we do all that with our heads firmly planted on our shoulders, not chasing after phantom saviors that will never materialize and save the day.
I realize I haven’t been doing my job with this blog. It appears that one of the primary purposes of blogging is to get people all riled up and irritated. It’s called ‘drama’, from what I’m told, and I’ve been far short of my required amount.
I imagine this little post about the tragedy of New Orleans should bring my controversy-o-meter up to standard blogging levels. If not, hell, maybe there are more people out there with critical thinking brains than I believe.
I’m going to say something here that a lot of people don’t want to hear. It’s the truth, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear it. I’m going to break down the catastrophe from its early warning stages to it’s current state of medieval chaos and mayhem. In doing so, I’m going to drag some stinking, rotting elephant carcasses out from under our proverbial living room rug and wave them in your faces so we can all discuss this in a realistic manner and dismiss the verbal fecal matter flying around regarding it.
New Orleans has something like 500,000 people. Those 500,000 people were warned of the storm a good 48 hours before landfall, which happened in the pre-dawn hours of Monday, the 29th. According to reports on CNN, as early as Saturday the 27th, as many as 100,000 of these people, a full 20%, didn’t have the resources to leave. A woman is quoted as saying ‘if you have no money, you can’t go.’ By Sunday morning, President Bush had declared Louisiana an emergency area. Mayor Nagin was already discussing a ‘mandatory’ evacuation on Saturday, and declared one on Sunday despite the fact that the ‘mandatory’ part was unenforceable.
Now we all know what has happened since. The storm hit. The ‘worst’ didn’t happen, the storm blew well enough east to spare New Orleans the leading edge and the worst wind damage. On Tuesday, the first levee was breached, and the waters began to rise at an alarming rate. This is generally when everything went to hell. It’s been hell since, and I’ll skip past all the sordid tales of chaos and inhumanity for now.
Let’s start back at the beginning. 100,000 people could not leave? Does anyone actually believe that number is anywhere near accurate? Last I checked, people have legs, and if people want to go somewhere, they go. (My apologies to those without legs, but I do assume you have some sort of wheeled device that someone with legs could use to get you to safety.) This is where the lines began to be drawn by many: rich and poor. You see, New Orleans has a poverty level of around 20%, so they’re suggesting here that the city’s poor simply couldn’t afford to leave town and escape the hurricane.
And here we have our first terribly inflammatory statement: I’d say that number and statement, that around 100,000 couldn’t leave, is some of that unmitigated verbal fecal matter I mentioned earlier. That’s right, here we go, boys and girls, down that dark, nasty alley called reality and reason. I would suggest that there were potential routes of escape for the vast majority of those who stayed. However, as early as Saturday, in the midst of this talk of ‘mandatory’ evacuation, we have the vocal, public plan to use the Superdome as a place for those who can’t leave. We aren’t talking bedridden people in hospitals, we’re talking about people able to cross town and get into the stadium…but not out of the city, apparently.
Michelle Malkin was linking to bloggers discussing the sheer stupidity of this idea over the weekend, before the storm hit. How it holds 40,000 people, but only has backup power for lights and no environmental controls, how the bathrooms would be the first casualty of flooding, how there was a complete lack of food and supplies…you get the idea. And yet, here are somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 people (depending on what source you heed) showing up with the clothes on their backs.
I’d like to jump in here at this point and let the cat out of the bag a little early. I’m going further on this, but for those who aren’t on board yet, I want to stop the train and allow for easier boarding.
What do we have here? We have a bunch of people who are confident that government will protect them. There’s absolutely no sense of self-preservation here at all. If I’m leaving my house with the knowledge that it will likely not be there when I return, with the knowledge that the city could be underwater in less than 24 hours, I think I’m coming with more than my clothes and my favorite blankey. Let’s press forward, there’s a trail here to follow and we’re just beginning.
The flooding starts, conditions at the Superdome (and everywhere else) deteriorate, looting begins, people start dying by the dozen, the shooting starts, things go thoroughly apocalyptic. Relief isn’t immediate, from what we read and hear. People start going a little mad, trying to hijack helicopters and whatnot. The whole thing starts to look like a Romero movie, but a little darker and more violent. And that brings us to now.
Mayor Nagin, a man who seemed to be handling things well in the beginning, begins to crack. The headlines all report his latest public appearance, a tearful outburst over the lack of federal help. Giuliani, this man is not. Never saw Rudy simpering over public airwaves that those big meanies in Washington weren’t sending stuff down fast enough.
It all seems to solid, doesn’t it? A mayor trying to save his city, a people abandoned in their hour of need, the constant reminder that, apparently, the majority of the stranded are not Caucasian…such terrible, tragic stuff. Bad President, BAD. No donut for you.
Ah, but there’s that alley again, and it’s getting darker by the minute. How about this picture, hosted on Yahoo with absolutely no fanfare, but unearthed by Drudge? That’s about a hundred busses, maybe more. The good Mr. Nagin couldn’t scrape together 100 people capable of driving a school bus to evacuate the Superdome before the storm hit? Or, even in lieu of that, move the busses out of the path of destruction so that they could be used to shuttle people out once the worst passed?
What about city busses? What about police vehicles? What about just about anything other than providing ‘shelters’ that were very, very clearly not shelter at all?
Now we have wonderful folks like Jesse Jackson Jr. and Kanye West proclaiming that this has something to do with the color of the people who are currently stranded in these ‘shelters’. Well, considering the good Mayor Nagin is the same color as those people, I’d say there are some questions to be asked about how seriously Mr. Mandatory Evacuation was taking things in the hours leading up to the storm. His pleas only achieved 80% of the city to leave, at BEST estimates. The 20% that remain are supposedly poor people of his own racial background. We have evidence that not nearly enough was done to help actually get those people out once they made the fatal mistake of ‘riding it out’. To top it all off, he provides ‘shelters’ WITHIN the zone of absolute greatest danger, completely undercutting his own ‘mandatory’ evacuation.
Unfortunately, this is the liberal mindset’s most deadly illustration to date. These people were convinced that Mother Government would save them, provide them shelter, keep them warm and fed. Today we have quotes from people still in the city complaining that they just have cold MRE’s from the National Guard to eat, and not warm meals. We have reports that the Guard was greeted by many who applauded, but some who jeered and said the whole city should be burned down for leaving them behind.
Denied the teat that they were convinced was theirs, they wail like any baby who doesn’t get a bottle when he wants it.
Wow, that’s a harsh thing to say about people who have been living in these conditions, Justin, you’re really just a callous bastard, aren’t you?
No, I’m out here living in reality. The real world. (Well, as close to it as one can come out here in Aztlan.) Everyone seems to want to cling to this fantasy world where some higher human power, some organization paid for by taxpayer dollars, will swoop in and carry them all away to someplace warm and safe.
Guess what, brothers and sisters, I am here today to tell you that storytime is over, the great governmental Prince Charming is not coming to save you, and the only way you will live happily ever after is by God’s good grace and your own diligence and hard work.
You have a liberal Democrat mayor clearly not doing everything logically possible to save his city, then crying on the radio when the feds can’t save it fast enough for him.
You have a small portion of a great city so foolish and blinded by decades of lies that they believe staying in a gigantic punchbowl is a good and safe idea when a gigantic faucet is headed their way.
Bear in mind, only a portion of these potential 100,000 are included here. A number of them stayed very intentionally. They knew the city would be abandoned, and stayed to prey on the empty stores and streets, perpetrating just about every crime you could imagine. These are the people that don’t need rescuing, society needs to be rescued from them.
But I digress. My point here isn’t that these people somehow deserve their fate, but we’re letting their plight sway our entire perception of this event. The reality is, the vast majority of New Orleans had the simple self-preservation instinct to leave before the storm hit. They were willing to do what it took to get themselves and their families out. These people bear the brunt of the tragedy, they left everything they had and sacrificed everything just to keep on living. They have the hope that everything will one day be okay again, and are willing to do whatever it took to protect their lives and those of their loved ones.
There are also a percentage that stayed, and are not suffering greatly. An excellent military blogger pointed out a fantastic blog run by some former military folks who stayed in New Orleans in their office building. They’re relatively self-sufficient, trying to help their fellow man, and above all are NOT sitting around complaining that the government didn’t do enough to get them out once they decided to stay. This proves that, with enough will and hard work, you could even stay and survive. On your own. Without once suckling at government’s teat.
So yes, the majority of New Orleans proved themselves to be smart, tenacious, and willing to do what it took to survive and carry on. What we have on the ground in NO at this point are a small majority very unhappy with how government has treated them. Yes, I know some had valid reasons why they couldn’t get out, but I am firmly convinced that number is very, very small.
All that said, I hope the best for everyone down there trapped in Fallujah West, even those who foolishly believed that their mayor or their president would swoop in, Superman-like, and save them from a catastrophe they all knew was coming. I’m not including the animals currently hunting in the city, for them all I wish is a large-caliber round somewhere vital and a sure, final end.
I do have to say that my limit for those blaming anyone but those who CHOSE to stay behind for their plight has been breached just as thoroughly as those levees. Huffington is hosting people claiming blacks are resorting to cannibalism to survive. Kanye West uses a telethon to benefit the city as a platform for declaring that Bush hates black people and that America is designed to help poor blacks last. RFK Jr. and oh-so-many pundits and armchair pundits are claiming this is, of course, Bushitler’s fault, either by Kyoto, or global warming, or his god-like mutant weather-controlling powers. Michael Moore is even chiming in, still bitching about Iraq, as if the problem here is that we have troops over there so we can’t help anyone here. These people have all, pardon the severe understatement, lost the plot.
I don’t have much of a voice here, but maybe some of you might agree with me and start spreading this line of thought to others, as inflammatory and non-warm-cuddly-fuzzy, to others. Let’s assign responsibility where it belongs: to the individual, not the insane and offensive Moonbat Whackjob Patrol’s list of most popular blame theories.
Most of all, let’s pray for and help those who did what they had to do to survive and left everything, every single thing they had, to make it through this alive. People camping on highways, staying with strangers, seeking shelter in cities thousands of miles away from their homes. The real absolute, total tragedy rests on their shoulders. If anyone will rebuild New Orleans and restore it to what it once was, it will assuredly be these people. Right now, they’re in a place so nightmarish it’s hard to even ponder. The American Dream for them has been simplified a great deal: don’t starve, don’t die, don’t let those around you die. We can help them, we can help the city, but all these smoke and mirrors focusing on a small portion of those who were failed by the pipe dreams of government-as-parent just isn’t fruitful in any way. The Guard is in, supplies are flowing, the dead will be collected and mourned, the water will drain away, everything will slowly start returning to normal. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these people we see so much of on the news, the ones who chose to stay based on government’s promises of safety, those people will likely continue on in their delusions. People with that mindset don’t rebuild cities, they wait for government (and the tax money of others) to do it for them. People with that mindset don’t build much of anything, because their sense of entitlement has been inflated to the point of no return.
We must support those who lack that sense, who instead possess another sense: the common variety. Let’s help them work, let’s help them be safe, let’s join together as a nation and heal the gaping wound carved into us by Katrina. My only plea is that we do all that with our heads firmly planted on our shoulders, not chasing after phantom saviors that will never materialize and save the day.
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