OUCH!
FASTER?
Posted by B. Preston
JunkYardBlog
I've been saying for days that the feds' response to Katrina was faster than for previous hurricanes. I've been corroborated:
Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:
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"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."
For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.
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If NOLA hadn't melted down and the Democrats hadn't seen the storm as both a political threat and opportunity, we would still have had a major crisis on our hands but we wouldn't have the division and uproar we have now to go along with it. The Democrats wouldn't be making up charges to sling at the feds if the local officials, Democrats all, had simply done their jobs. But the Democrats foresaw images of President Bush helping millions of people, many of them black, and foresaw that those images might harm their party's standing with black voters by a percentage point or two. And they saw in NOLA's demographics the chance to smear Bush and the GOP as masters of genocide. They also probably understand at least intuitively that Democrat leaders in NOLA demonstrated breathtaking and lifetaking incompetence, which was an additional threat to their party nationally--a party already seen by a majority of Americans as unreliable in the face of national security threats. So they shamelessly smeared away, facts be damned. And the country's last remaining shreds of unity have been damned along with those facts.
Though the federal response to Katrina was nothing like the Democrats' description of it, we may as well prepare to hear about it all for the rest of our lives. The sinking of New Orleans is going to be with us for a long, long time. The Democrats have turned fabricating bloody shirts from thin air into an art form over the past few years. What they end up doing with the Katrina aftermath is likely to leave us pining for the days when they only unfairly pinned the James Byrd lynching and Florida 2000 on President Bush. From New Orleans, they are going to drag corpses and hang them on the President. That's why the media wants to photograph the dead, incidentally. The Democrats will be acting against the facts to hang the dead on President Bush's neck, but that hasn't stopped them in the past and I see no reason to think it will stop them in the future.
UPDATE: For the race pimping Democrats, it's Mission Accomplished! Now they just have to keep the big mo going...
nytimes.com
junkyardblog.net
post-gazette.com |
