World Doesn't End; Angry Left Hardest Hit
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BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, September 12, 2005
Hurricane Katrina's death toll "has climbed past 400, making it one of the deadliest hurricanes in the United States in a century," Reuters reports:
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Louisiana raised its official death count to 197 on Sunday. Mississippi, the other hardest hit state, had 211 confirmed killed. There were also fatalities, though much lower numbers, in Alabama and Florida.
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The number is likely to climb as searchers find more bodies, but the estimates of 10,000 dead that some officials were bandying plainly were far too high. It's even realistic to hope that the toll doesn't top 1,000.
Believe it or not, reaction from the Angry Left is mixed. Josh Marshall calls the apparent lower death toll "possibly encouraging news." But Vanity Fair's James Wolcott saw in the assumed higher death toll an opportunity to diminish a crime against humanity:
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Any number substantially higher than 3,000 dead presents a political and symbolic dilemma for the most avid advocates of the War on Terror. . . . Since 9/11, "3000" has been elevated to a sacred, symbolic number in political discourse. . . . If 10,000 deaths amount to but a drop of blood in the abattoir of time, 3000 is an even smaller drop, and once you begin to shrug off large numbers of dead to the caprices of fate, striking a militant pose over a smaller number becomes even harder. . . .
Whatever the final numbers are from Hurricane Katrina, it will be harder for the WOT propagandists to ritualistically invoke the "3000 dead" to the same sonorous effect.
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A week and a half ago, we likened the opportunistic spirit in which the Angry Left was attacking President Bush to that which animated looters stealing TV sets. Some of our readers thought this was an invidious comparison, and after reading Wolcott's post, we think they may have a point. Possibly we were too harsh on looters.
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