Conservatives to New Orleans: Stop Whining Already

It's hard to caricature the views of conservatives, who take such offense when they're accused by liberals of being heartless and greedy. But when bloggers at right-wing sites such as Townhall.com proudly proclaim, "It's time to get over Katrina already," then the true heart of darkness inside today's conservatives is exposed for all to see. John Hawkins writes (apparently, he's not a parody, like "Ed Anger," created by the Weekly World News):

Two years after Katrina, everywhere you turn, there are people carping, whining, and kvetching. Just why hasn't the pity party for the citizens of New Orleans run out of booze and chips yet?

It's not as if hurricanes are a once a millennium event in the United States. In fact, residents of Florida have so many of them that they don't even cancel a barbecue for anything under a Category 3.

Moreover, people lose their homes in this country every day of the year. If it isn't a hurricane, it's an earthquake. If it isn't an earthquake, it's a tornado. If it isn't a tornado, it's a fire. If it isn't a fire, it's a flood. Yet nobody sits and frets about John Doe, age 58, who lost his house in a flash flood two years ago or Jane Doe, age 60, who had her house blown away by a twister back in 2005.

But, we're all supposed to eternally sit around and weep tiny little tears of sadness for the people who really took it on the chin in a hurricane because they chose to live in a city shaped like a soup bowl on the coast. Let me tell all the citizens of New Orleans something that should have been told to them 18 months ago: it's time to stop playing the sympathy card and get over it.

Nobody is owed a living for the rest of his life because he had a bad break two years ago. Yet, we still have people affected by Katrina who have FEMA paying their rent. How sad and pathetic is it that these shiftless people are still leaching off their fellow citizens? Since when is being in the path of a hurricane supposed to give you a permanent "Get Out of Work Free" card?

In this right-wing analysis, we're simply supposed to forget about all that's happened in the federal response to Katrina. We're supposed to forget about the billions promised to homeowners and other residents to reclaim their lives after the criminal neglect of the Bush Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers, the nearly 2,000 dead, the hundreds of thousands left stranded, a major city allowed to die, the federal goverment officials who couldn't be bothered to come to the aid of people dying on TV for nearly a week, those corpses left abandoned in the convention center and Superdome while Brownie and Chertoff and Bush dithered as they blamed the Democrats in Louisiana for not filing their requests for help using the right federally mandated jargon and forms. It's all been chronicled in such investigative books as Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the failure of Homeland Security.

As Publisher's Weekly summarized this chronicle:

The fatal inundation of New Orleans was no natural disaster, argues this hard-hitting investigative report. Wall Street Journal reporters Cooper and Block finger two very man-made causes of the tragedy. The first was the decades-long failure of local officials and the Army Corps of Engineers to fix New Orleans' poorly designed and constructed levees and floodwalls, which collapsed under moderate hurricane conditions. The second and more spectacular was the breakdown of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after its incorporation into the Department of Homeland Security, which cut FEMA's funding and authority and reoriented it toward the national obsession with terrorism. The result, when the flood came, was a bumbling federal response hobbled by complacent planning, miscommunication, red tape (even recovery of the dead was delayed by paperwork) and an inability to deliver promised supplies and transportation. The authors' exhaustively researched account slogs through the intricacies of this bureaucratic nightmare and goes beyond the usual pillorying of FEMA head Michael Brown to criticize higher officials in the White House and, especially, DHS.

But to conservatives, who don't believe there is any proper role for government except to cut taxes, pre-emptively wage war and offer contracts for GOP donors, Katrina was proof that government can't work and the poor in New Orleans, in essence, deserved to suffer and die.

As one rabid reader to the Townhall blog declared:

The levee walls will be like the Wailing Wall in Israel and maybe we'll all be ordered to dawn [sic] white garbs and trek down there to engage in public self criticism, before we empty our pockets so that those New Orleans can continue to do nothing but bellyache about how this is such a racist, unsympathetic country - unlike Cuba, Red China and North Korea.

All of this we'll do because no one has the leadership or the courage to grab those people down there by the neck, look them in their beady, ungrateful eyes, and tell those sorry wastes to get to work.

These are some of the people who voted President Bush into power and will help make sure that the federal government will continue to offer, under this administration, more empty promises than real help to those who need it.

Comments

[realpolitic]

In his diatribe written in Townhall.com, John Hawkins uses the term "shiftless people." Are there more than a few racial overtones to this unfortunate phrase?

[AsaNisMasa]

cause that is exactly how Jesus would've responded to the Katrina victims "cast thee out of my sight sinners and get back to work!"

[CHRIS64]

YOU ALL MAKE SOME GOOD AND SOME "sick" POINTS HERE. wheres IS ALL THE MONEY THAT THE PRIVATE SECTOR SENT? MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS WERE DONATED TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE PEOPLE OF 9/11 AND TO Katrina VICTIMS NOT TO THE ORGANIZATION'S THAT PUT THEIR GREEDY HANDS IN THE CAUFFERS AND TOOK 99% LEAVING 1% TO HELP, THIS IS WRONG RED CROSS AND OTHER INFAMOUS ORGANIZATION'S TOOK MONEY SAYING THEY NEEDED TO UPGRADE THEIR SYSTEM'S TO STAY IN TOUCH WITH THE WHOLE OF THE DISASTER'S, "BULLSHIT" I SAY,THIS MONEY SHOULD BE ACCOUNTED FOR AND GIVEN TO THE PEOPLE IT RIGHTLY BELONGS TO. WE HAVE STARTED A WEB SITE CALLED FIGHTINGTHEMAN.ORG IT IS NOT OF COLOR IT IS GOVERNMENT, THE GOVERNMENT IS THE "MAN".IF YOU KNOW OF ANY NONPROFIT ORG THAT KEPT MORE THAN WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE THAT INFORMATION YOU CAN POST A RESPONSE OR EMAIL ME AT [e-mail]

[normathumb]

You can be sure those same creeps will have their hands out for relief when their porfolios crash. I was in NOLA and thereabouts last spring. There was a lot of work being done and vast amounts waiting. To suggest poeple are sitting around waiting for someone else to do something is both ignorent and simple conservative political hubris. That said,I wonder how satisfied Haley Barbour and Trent Lott are with the federal response. I don't hear them calling for less federal assistense. The vast amount of devastation was staggering. I have been through floods and tornadoes and never saw the totality of destruction over so vast an area.

[woodsywizz]

The Bush/Rove plan is for New Orleans to be repopulated by wealthy (Republican) people. More votes for the Permanent Republican Majority. It's not hyprocisy. It's brazen cruelty, heartless 'realpolitik'. "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer [Buschi]".

[ThomasDoubting]

This is called "Ethnic Cleansing"!

[thedirtman]

To me conservatives are like Rita Crosby. She sits in a posh air-conditioned office making big money showing pictures of desperate blacks running through Walmart in the middle of a catastrophe getting what they need to survive. Over and over she shows the same half-minute of footage.

Look at me I'm the real victim here. Those people will cause my prices to go up. This poor white woman sitting before you in this swank studio is the real victim here.

At some point we have to be real. Much of New Orleans is no longer fit for rebuilding. But to cast blame on innocent victims is not really even human in my book. It is barbaric.

[winningticket]

I was Katrina victim. I was out of my house for five months. I want to thank my firends, families and strangers that I don't know for standing by me in my desperate hour. I want the world to remember when my city was dying, Bush was partying and playing air guitar in San Diego. I guess these conservative commentators feel no shame living in the strongest country in the world that couldn't or wouldn't help it's own people. And yet conservatives are proud of telling Katrina victims to sdhut up and suffer our fate. Heckuvajob! Their could be no hell that's bad enough for these hooligans and monsters!

[CaptainVideo]

There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in world views between people who favor a dog-eat-dog, everbody is on his own, winner take all, and the devil take the hindmost society and people who favor a nurturing, caring, "we're all in this together" society. These two groups are forever doomed to talk past each other and not communicate because their funamental world views are irreconcilable.

[backhandpath]

Yeah, yeah, and your point?

[slg]

You hear the engineering failed yet the same engineers get the job rebuilding them.

The powers that be fail to ensure the city is repaired with efficiency, common sense and an eye for sustainability yet they still get to decide where the money goes.

"Beatitudes" makes an eloquent case for the importance of wetlands everywhere. They are a self sustaining filter, buffering wind and wave. Concrete engineering and relentless resource extraction degrades everything it touches.

We're at the nexus point. Continue down the hierarchical, exploitation road or rebuild cities in a way they become part of the ecology, enhancing life. We've had the capability and the knowledge for centuries.

[doctorj2u]

I wonder what you think is THERE right now. This debate over whether New Orleans is going to be rebuilt or not is a sham. What is at debate is whether our government is going to protect its own citizens or not. The amount of money it would take to correct the problem is 3 months in Iraq yet this idea is actually being considered by US citizens and it breaks my heart. This country has fallen lower than I ever thought possible.

[wry]

I'm not sure what to do about New Orleans as a city. The people need assistance to rebuild their lives, but what about the physical city?
I live in a wealthy community that has started to have serious floods due to overdevelopment. I can't imagine having the same kind of devastation with no financial resources.
Is New Orleans no longer viable as a City?

[Boyaca]

America is the image of greed. Get all you can. Step on anyone you have to. Beg, steal, cheat, screw your neighbour, look out for number one. The terrorists that are killing your country are not in Asia they are yourselves. When you can watch your neighbours suffer a mortal blow such as those in New Orleans and rationalize turning your backs on them, what does that make you? In the Amazon they used to tie a gourd to a tree. They did this to trap monkeys. The gourd had a whole in it just big enough for a monkey to get his hand into. They put fruit peel in the gourd. Once the monkey grabbed a handful of the peel, the natives could just walk up and take him. The monkey was so greedy that he would sooner lose his life than let go of what he had. There is something very, very American about that monkey.

[logicalliberal]

SHIFTLESS?!! There is only one word that typically follows shiftless, and it isn't "people." I'm sure this whiny racist would cry like a baby if someone knocked over his latte, much less his home.

[flatus]

I'm a progressive (mainly).

It still does not make sense to me to rebuild a city that's next to a lake, next to a river, next to an ocean that is situated below their levels.

I empathize with Harry Schear's 'lost city' but no amount of correct Corp of Engineer wall bulding can reduce the common sense expressed in my second paragraph.

[normathumb]

Does it make sense to rebuild San Francisco or Los Angeles after an earthquake? How about Wichita Falls after a tornado? It is only going to happen again.

[backhandpath]

You "are" nothing as no one "is" anything. Perhaps sometimes you Behave in a progressive manner while sometimes not. Such moral ambiguity becomes even more evident in your banal "below sea level" attack. Please do not confuse common sense with common ignorance. How can you be "mainly progressive" as that makes about as much sense as being "partially regressive"? Are you, say 80% progressive until faced with catastrophic engineering challenges, at which point you become 20% regressive? Meanwhile Rome burns.
Harry's posts and the resultant comments have already confronted and disposed of your "straw man" argument regarding the futility of large populations living below sea level.
Please look around your world and learn about it...and while your at it tell me if you find anyone who has become (mainly) pregnant.

[kwright]

over sixty percent of the netherlands lies below sea level. they have their floods and of course other problems controlling the environment in which they live but i don't see them relocating their country. we are duty bound as a nation to help the people of our own country and find viable solutions that work. we do have the technology and man power to do so.

[thedirtman]

As a trained environmental scientist I have to say that when better homes can be built in Baton Rouge it doesn't make sense to rebuild a death trap. Sorry New Orleans, but I call it as I see it.

However, there is much to be said about courage and strength and ingenuity. We are responsible as a nation to find viable solutions.