Katrina Letter.
Discussion
I recieved this from a friend in Slidell,Louisiana,and thought you guys may want to read and comment.
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
> Welfare State
>
> by Robert Tracinski
>
> It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
> how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because
> it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there.
> The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are
> confronting a natural disaster.
>
> If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is
> obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
> evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
> flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural
> disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
> pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
> nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
>
> Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
> is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
> suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not
> expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but
> about rape, murder, and looting.
>
> But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
>
> The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
> federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
> Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel
> has gotten the story wrong.
>
> The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
> over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
> Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
>
> The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
>
> For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
> confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in
> an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
> emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been
> saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not
> even what we expect from a Third World country.
>
> When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
> work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize
> to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We
> are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather
> than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen
> this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic
> light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and
> serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection)
> and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
>
> So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
>
> To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
> description from a Washington Times story:
>
> "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists,
> knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and
> police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
>
> "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured
> in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
>
> "Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
> Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill
> orders.
>
> " 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,'
> she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops
> know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if
> necessary and I expect they will.' "
>
> The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
> shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an
> armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
> listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks
> exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
>
> What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
> orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
> the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
> drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
> doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
>
> Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
> destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help
> them?
>
> My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
> sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
> Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
> architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
> South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one
> of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The
> projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and
> irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
>
> What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff
> of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the
> informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news
> channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the
> residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and
> of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's
> public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial
> fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan
> for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let
> many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these
> two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to
> live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
>
> There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
> deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from
> two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected,
> over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness.
> The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent
> administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
>
> All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the
> city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
> despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city
> corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the
> flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political
> supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of
> emergency.
>
> No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
> are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example,
> for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted
> an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from
> the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the
> chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the
> opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of
> individualism.
>
> What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
> welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
> behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
> responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
> disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome
> the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
> government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a
> disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
>
> But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
> their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do
> they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they
> are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before.
> Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is
> a way of life for them.
>
> The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
> encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
> has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
>
> Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
> ---------------------------------------------------
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
> Welfare State
>
> by Robert Tracinski
>
> It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
> how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because
> it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there.
> The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are
> confronting a natural disaster.
>
> If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is
> obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
> evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
> flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural
> disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
> pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
> nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
>
> Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
> is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
> suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not
> expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but
> about rape, murder, and looting.
>
> But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
>
> The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
> federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
> Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel
> has gotten the story wrong.
>
> The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
> over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
> Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
>
> The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
>
> For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
> confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in
> an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
> emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been
> saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not
> even what we expect from a Third World country.
>
> When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
> work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize
> to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We
> are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather
> than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen
> this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic
> light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and
> serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection)
> and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
>
> So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
>
> To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
> description from a Washington Times story:
>
> "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists,
> knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and
> police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
>
> "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured
> in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
>
> "Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
> Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill
> orders.
>
> " 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,'
> she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops
> know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if
> necessary and I expect they will.' "
>
> The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
> shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an
> armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
> listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks
> exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
>
> What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
> orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
> the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
> drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
> doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
>
> Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
> destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help
> them?
>
> My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
> sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
> Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
> architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
> South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one
> of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The
> projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and
> irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
>
> What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff
> of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the
> informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news
> channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the
> residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and
> of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's
> public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial
> fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan
> for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let
> many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these
> two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to
> live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
>
> There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
> deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from
> two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected,
> over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness.
> The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent
> administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
>
> All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the
> city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
> despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city
> corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the
> flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political
> supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of
> emergency.
>
> No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
> are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example,
> for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted
> an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from
> the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the
> chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the
> opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of
> individualism.
>
> What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
> welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
> behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
> responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
> disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome
> the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
> government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a
> disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
>
> But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
> their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do
> they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they
> are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before.
> Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is
> a way of life for them.
>
> The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
> encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
> has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
>
> Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
> ---------------------------------------------------
did anyone see the video for katrina aid, with mike myers and kanye west, around a minute after mike myers has finished talking kanye west simply says: 'President Bush doesn't like black people.' Mike Myers then looks all lost as he doesnt have a clue what is going on, and they cut to Chris Tucker who doesn't have a clue either
"Some people just shouldn't be allowed to breed!"
And quite rightly too. It's about time Americans acknowledged the third world aspect of large parts of their pwn country. Maybe they should start sorting out their own internal injustices before telling other countries about how they should fix theirs.
I love America and I have hardly ever met an unpleasant American - but there is a dark underbelly to their society that they often refuse to acknowledge exists. Katrina has exposed it in all its horror. And I'm not just talking about black people carrying guns - I'm referring to the harsh treatment of the disenfranchised, poor and elderly who were seemingly abandoned to face the consequences of the hurricane. It seemed to denote a singular lack of compassion or caring which, whether true or not, is certainly how it has played out for the rest of the world to see.
I love America and I have hardly ever met an unpleasant American - but there is a dark underbelly to their society that they often refuse to acknowledge exists. Katrina has exposed it in all its horror. And I'm not just talking about black people carrying guns - I'm referring to the harsh treatment of the disenfranchised, poor and elderly who were seemingly abandoned to face the consequences of the hurricane. It seemed to denote a singular lack of compassion or caring which, whether true or not, is certainly how it has played out for the rest of the world to see.
ZR1cliff said:
I recieved this from a friend in Slidell,Louisiana,and thought you guys may want to read and comment.
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
> Welfare State
>
> by Robert Tracinski
>
> It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out
> how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because
> it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there.
> The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are
> confronting a natural disaster.
>
> If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is
> obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to
> evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the
> flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural
> disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people
> pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors,
> nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
>
> Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do
> is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are
> suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not
> expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but
> about rape, murder, and looting.
>
> But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
>
> The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
> federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
> Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel
> has gotten the story wrong.
>
> The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen
> over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane
> Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
>
> The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
>
> For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
> confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in
> an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other
> emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been
> saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not
> even what we expect from a Third World country.
>
> When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They
> work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize
> to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We
> are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather
> than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen
> this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic
> light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and
> serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection)
> and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
>
> So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
>
> To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
> description from a Washington Times story:
>
> "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists,
> knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and
> police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
>
> "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured
> in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
>
> "Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
> Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill
> orders.
>
> " 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,'
> she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops
> know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if
> necessary and I expect they will.' "
>
> The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
> shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an
> armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid,
> listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks
> exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
>
> What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an
> orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm
> the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to
> drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the
> doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
>
> Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
> destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help
> them?
>
> My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a
> sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News
> Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
> architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the
> South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one
> of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The
> projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and
> irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
>
> What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff
> of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the
> informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news
> channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the
> residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and
> of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's
> public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial
> fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan
> for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let
> many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these
> two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to
> live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
>
> There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
> deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from
> two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected,
> over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness.
> The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent
> administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
>
> All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the
> city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city,
> despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city
> corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the
> flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political
> supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of
> emergency.
>
> No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some
> are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example,
> for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted
> an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from
> the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the
> chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the
> opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of
> individualism.
>
> What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the
> welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
> behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
> responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
> disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome
> the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
> government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a
> disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
>
> But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving
> their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do
> they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they
> are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before.
> Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is
> a way of life for them.
>
> The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and
> encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that
> has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
>
> Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
> ---------------------------------------------------
Sorry if some think this is racist, etc. but the above letter rings true. I live around here, I have for 40 years; with exceptions, the above letter is accurate. It may not fit a socialst, or utopian view of things, but....facts are facts, and it is what it is. Look at what the dependency system(well meaning as it was)has done to New Orleans and take a lesson if your whole country follows such a model.
Eric Mc said:
And quite rightly too. It's about time Americans acknowledged the third world aspect of large parts of their pwn country. Maybe they should start sorting out their own internal injustices before telling other countries about how they should fix theirs.
I love America and I have hardly ever met an unpleasant American - but there is a dark underbelly to their society that they often refuse to acknowledge exists. Katrina has exposed it in all its horror. And I'm not just talking about black people carrying guns - I'm referring to the harsh treatment of the disenfranchised, poor and elderly who were seemingly abandoned to face the consequences of the hurricane. It seemed to denote a singular lack of compassion or caring which, whether true or not, is certainly how it has played out for the rest of the world to see.
IMO you've missed the point here Eric
In New York, under Giuliani, there had been much progress towards cleaning up crime in the years before 9/11. New Orleans has been notorious, for decades, for police and government corruption, hence the high crime rate and trouble with managing the infrastructure. It astonishes me that they would let criminals out of prisons during a disaster. If they did this, what did they think would happen? Anyway, the bad behavior in New Orleans is not due to the non-criminal majority, but due to the deeply ingrained criminal element (and certainly due to the recently released violent criminals). They could hardly keep crime under control when there wasn't anything extraordinary going on, so it's no surprise that that same element of the population would go nuts when things go frome minimal law enforcement to none at all. I would be surprised if most of the perpetrators after the disaster weren't mostly these released criminals. 200+ New Orleans cops had turned in their badges when things started getting even more out of hand (read this somewhere or heard it on the radio). It's quite a different situation from other disaster-struck cities we've seen. I can see how some of what he says rings true, but the poor are not necessarily criminals, even though there is a link established between poverty and crime.
los angeles said:
In regard to your comment exactly, some Rebublicans are voicing their unease and some shock over the aid Bush has promised to devistated regions. Senator Tom Coburn said, "I don't believe that everything that should happen in Louisiana should be paid for by the rest of the country."
Callous?, unpatriotic?,
There is a limit to the duties the Federal government should assume. Any Republican who believes in principle over temporary expediency is going to opppose the massive sums promised for reconstruction in New Orleans.
Now I believe that the Federal government acts as a Flood protection insurer in those cases it should pay out, but promises of $200bn of expenditure?, that is simply George Bush bowing to the media onslaught.
I agree with most of what the letter has to say.
The problem was caused by the moral corrosiveness of decades on welfare, the belief that someone else is responsible for looking after you and not yourself.
The relief and rescue effort was hindered most of all by the actions of a sizeable percentage of those left behind in New Orleans.
However because those left behind happened to be black it is not PC to point it out.
The problem was caused by the moral corrosiveness of decades on welfare, the belief that someone else is responsible for looking after you and not yourself.
The relief and rescue effort was hindered most of all by the actions of a sizeable percentage of those left behind in New Orleans.
However because those left behind happened to be black it is not PC to point it out.
los angeles said:
... but promises of $200bn of expenditure?, that is simply George Bush bowing to the media onslaught.
So he is a weak and ineffectual president?
There are many areas I disagree with George Bush, I just don't follow conventional media wisdom in this country, that seems to think he is the anti-Christ.
los angeles said:
...that'll be the "reformed" alcoholic at work.
Where is your evidence for this assertion?
Oh, oh, here we go. Sometimes I talk about things that are common knowledge and not necessarily my own assumptions.
OK, so where is the evidence that this is common knowledge?
No, he is not the "anti-Christ", he is just an incompetent fool who does not have a clue as to what the correct response to ANY crisis should be. It's like watching a wind up dummy waiting to be cranked into action. It takes about two days for his senior advisors to coach him in the dialogue and speech making he needs to deliver to show the American people that he is, actually, in charge of the situation.
I have serious doubts that he has a single original thought in his head and is absolutely dependent on the coaching sessions he receives.
He is not totally unlike Ronald Reagan butReagan at least, had the unerring knack of setting the appropriate tone on each occasion - probably down to his inherent acting skills and knowledge of how to please an audience.
I have serious doubts that he has a single original thought in his head and is absolutely dependent on the coaching sessions he receives.
He is not totally unlike Ronald Reagan butReagan at least, had the unerring knack of setting the appropriate tone on each occasion - probably down to his inherent acting skills and knowledge of how to please an audience.
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