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| Home Front: Politix |
| The Over-Responders |
| 2005-09-09 |
| September 9, 2005 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Hurricane Katrina not only covered New Orleans in toxic goo, it also flushed out a large, vocal and potentially pestilential cadre of First Over-Responders. Rep. Bob Wexler set the stage just minutes after the first levee burst by accusing President Bush of gross incompetence. Rep. Harold Ford followed shortly after with an artless race-card play, wondering aloud why so many people of color had been stranded. In time, virtually every Democratic panjandrum found some novel way to politicize the Atlantic typhoon. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton inveigled against the evils of Big Oil. Sen. Edward Kennedy suggested holding a forum on New Orleans' racial and economic tensions -- during John Roberts' Supreme Court confirmation hearings. There was talk of shutting off future tax cuts, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, firing Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, recalling all National Guard units from Iraq and revamping the federal government's plans for dealing with terrorist attacks. Opinions wildly outnumbered facts among the Over-Responders. At one point, Randall Robinson alleged that locals were cannibalizing the bloated and blistered bodies of the city's dead, while rap star Kanye West repeated the urban legend that black looters were described as "looters," while whites were designated as "survivors." Military expert Celine Dion, seconded by Michael Moore, alleged that the Pentagon had failed to dispatch helicopters to the scene (the helicopters arrived within hours of the hurricane's making landfall). The three most popular tropes claimed insanely that the 60,000 or so people dispatched by the federal government to lend aid, along with thousands of private citizens who flocked to the Gulf Coast to offer aid and succor, were guided by racist impulses; that they sought only to help affluent whites, leaving the poor (especially blacks) to fend for themselves in the nightmare world of New Orleans; and that George W. Bush was responsible for this explosion of physical and spiritual misery. These claims, aided by an onslaught of anti-Bush press accounts, failed utterly. A paltry 13 percent of the public believes the president deserves blame for the mess. Nearly two-thirds of those responding to a CNN-Gallup poll said the administration shouldn't fire anybody -- presumably because mere mortals ought not to take the blame for hurricanes. Let's face it, the political left -- aided and abetted by Pat Buchanan and members of the bed-wetting right -- made utter fools of themselves. Fortunately, the American public showed a surer sense of proportion and a greater knack for leadership. While powerless politicians thundered, the public took action. Families packed up goods and shipped them to the Gulf Coast. Houses of worship organized fund-raisers. Truckers suspended normal business and headed to the region, offering to transport goods or people. Individual charitable donations exceeded $500 million in the week after the hurricane ripped into Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. As if to demonstrate the nonpartisan nature of human decency, Albert Gore Jr., once an almost-president, sent a bus south and brought it back with a load of evacuees, upon whom he and others lavished some old-fashioned Southern hospitality. Meanwhile, fellow Tennessean Bill Frist rolled up his sleeves and delivered free medical care to the sick and wounded. A friend of mine rented some helicopters and, with the approval of state and federal authorities, launched a series of operations to rescue stranded civilians and deliver humanitarian supplies to squatters trying to stay within the city. These people, and thousands more like them, didn't wait to fill out forms or organize press conferences. They headed to the scene and asked to help. In so doing, they -- not the political yobbos -- set the tone for post-Katrina America. We Americans always have measured ourselves by three things: our resilience, our ambition and our determination to do the right thing. Every unexpected setback calls forth strengths and virtues latent in the national character -- special skills we never dreamed would lie within us. When bad times come, we tell ourselves we can create good times. That's why nobody will care a year from now what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had to say this week. She offered nothing constructive. Instead, in the manner of New Yorkers after Sept. 11, the folks who form our national heart and soul will bury the dead, care for the living and build upon ruined soil the foundations of a revived civilization -- chastened by the big storm, educated by the failures of a culture that spawned looters and cheats, and inspired by the opportunity to say to the large and deadly storm, "Nice try, but you picked on the wrong country." Tony Snow is the host of the 'Tony Snow Show' on Fox News Radio. |
| Posted by:ARMYGUY |