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

[lisakaz]

These folks would feel the same way about the MN bridge collapse. Let's face it: they do not feel there is such a thing as "commonweal" and the only "common defense" they support is one where GOP donors get contracts to build weaponry. Our infrastructure as a whole has suffered owing to this blindness that We as a People all use and share resources such as bridges and levies. My parents suffered mild flooding in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. The only person who lost stuff of value was me. They got their ground flooring fixed with FEMA funding, back when FEMA worked.

I think it's a crime that there is no follow through to actually lead and govern from this WH and ignoramouses like these townhall doofi are just fine with this. What a disconnected bunch of Scrooges exist here. I guess we need some Mme La Farges pronto to wake them up.

[woodsywizz]

Roll the tumbrils.

[fpie]

Meanwhile we'll all have to dig deep to bail out the Wall Street twits who foolishly bought bundles of shakey sub prime mortgages. After all that is a real national emergency in the making (the WS twits that is, not the poor SOBs who will get tossed out of their homes).

[Beatitudes]

Anyone who grew up in the bayou country of South Louisiana like I did knew what was coming. When the government set up the Rockefeller Preserve it was supposed to protect the wetlands from the oil companies and the harsh use imposed by humans. But the preserve was given over to the oil companies and human indiscriminate use. When I brought my children there to see the country where I was raised - twenty years later - it had turned into a cesspool - no more roiling waters where fish lived, no nesting birds, the place was silent - and the waters were green with slim and oil slick and the precious land had eroded into the murky waters. My children looked at me as though I had led them into Dante's fifth circle of the inferno. This was all done to satisfy the oil and gas industry and the rapacious greed of corrupt politicians.
May they all descend into the inferno. We saw it coming,they were warned, but they simply didn't care. And now we are back to rebuild and repair - can we, or have we entered St. John of The Cross's "long dark night of the soul" or Mayhem's "In the read dark nights of the soul, it is always 3am."?"

Lyn LeJeune
The Beatitudes Network- Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans at www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com

[backhandpath]

As well, no one speaks a word about what happened to the rest of southern Louisiana because of hurricane Rita 3 weeks later. All that petro-chemical infrastructure along the coast was hit and spilled its goo all over the bayous. They had sea weed in the power lines 20 miles from the coast as far west as Morgan City! All the cattle, all the rice and all the sugar cane farms were ruined, the shrimping industry infrastructure devastated. The unbelievably dysfunctional government failure to respond to post-Rita south LA is overshadowed by the unbelievable dysfunctional government response to New Orleans which has been buried by the unbelievably dysfunctional government response to the war in Iraq which has been confused and shell-gamed with the unbelievably dysfunctional government response to 9/11, which served to completely distract valid public discourse on the unbelievably dysfunctional government response to the worse-than unbelievably dysfunctional Presidential elections in 2000. Sorry to hammer that nail in the coffin again and again but we really need to end this funeral for American democracy and bury this dysfunctional government in the ground so that we can institute a new (BELIEVABLE) (FUNCTIONAL) government in its place---the way the rule book says!
Are We The People or Not?

[thedirtman]

The 2000 Presidential election? I remember decisions made based on a frivolous debate. That guy standing next to Al Gore looks so much like his Daddy in a red tie! I like his tie much better!

Thanks for the post.

[doctorj2u]

I am a native New Orleanian still living in SE LA. My mother lives in coastal MS. These vile comments from the conservatives are what America has become to me. Cruelty, self absorption, injustice. America has left an entire region of its own country decimated and then adds to the misery by berating its citizens for speaking up. I have gone through the depression. I have gone through the anger. Now all that is left is the fact that this country is not the country I once thought it was. It has lost its very soul. It is not just the conservatives either. Where are the democrats? Where was Katrina in Pelosi's report when the Democrats took over Congress? No where. The democrats use us just like the Republicans do, as photo ops. In their commentary, they are just a little more kind. They always say it is ashame they have to desert us, global warming and all, you know. I am holding a mirror up to you America. This is the country you have become. It is not a pretty reflection. The ONE hope I have seen in all of this has been the volunteers. They represent the America I thought once existed. I thank them for their selfless love and giving nature. Maybe they can be the seed of a new movement to rebuild America like a phoenix from the ashes.

[blaze]

Despite a presidential veto and Republican obstruction, in the first seven moths of a new Democratic majority the 110th Congress was able to send the president Katrina recovery legislation that was signed into law including:

Waiving the local matching requirement under the Stafford Act, Legislation which potentially has the greatest positive impact, saving the region $1.9 billion and allowing work to begin on 20,000 stalled projects, Appropriating $6.4 billion in assistance which helped bolster levees, restore the coastline, recruit teachers, keep schools open, maintain health facilities, assist farmers and fishermen, provide housing assistance, assist small businesses, retain law enforcement and other essential government employees; and
additionally, providing much-needed congressional oversight-House Committees have held over 30 hearings on Katrina recovery. They also submitted legislation to bolster teachers pay in NOLA if they agreed to stay for another three years.

[BuzzingAlong]

Big whoop, legislation that was signed into law.

But the facts are that Katrina funds for rebuilding the devastated coastal areas of NO, LA, AL and MS, are being used by people who have no moral right to this money (compliments of the influence of reich-wing republican Jeff Sessions, greedy rich people are receiving money to build luxury condos in Tuscaloosa, Alabama).

Haley Barbour, Trent Lott, Alabama Governor Bob Riley and other rich reich-wing republicans are sure making sure that contracts and money for rebuilding go to their friends and relatives.

The funds have not filtered down to the people (white, black, Vietnamese, Native Americans, and a slew of others) who need money to rebuild.

[Robert59]

And you can bet those conservatives would be singing a different tune if it were their home and their city.

Aside from Biloxi (gaming and tourist industries, but now too expensive to live in for employees of those same industries) most Gulf Coast areas hit by Katrina haven't recovered.

As for all of those federal dollars they either have been misspent or promised but not delivered.

[Snakeback]

So, how's the repair of Trent Lott's house going? Now there's a guy that REALLY suffered from Katrina! He's entitled to a few million at least, wouldn't you say?

[Boomerwoman]

Right on the money Snakeback. Good ol boy Trent has a nice new home.

[kwright]

my niece is back from spending her summer break in new orleans. after talking to her i know first hand just what out failed government has and has not done. she lived in the 9th ward area. not a very pretty sight. the people do need our help. they are not lazy, freeloading, or worthless. they are human beings.

[anon004]

Also my thinking. If these people lost a second or third multi-million dollar home on, say, the outer banks due to a hurricane, they’d be the first in line to get federal money, and probably be the loudest to complain when it wasn't immediately forthcoming. It's just like Bush trying to stop the states (whatever happened to their almost religious belief in states' rights, BTW) from expanding children's health insurance programs, all the while enjoying the best health care money can buy at federal taxpayers' expense. And then there are their corporate friends, who have no problem with international competition as an excuse to eliminate and depress the wages of their workers, while they construct golden parachutes for themselves and lobby the government to eliminate anti-trust laws so they can merge and consolidate to avoid competition. (Not to mention tax breaks, subsidies, loan guarantees, etc.) Apparently, it's fine for the poor and middle class to struggle without help from natural disasters, without national health insurance and with the brutal effects of least common denominator competition. And, we should "'suck it up" and do it without "whining," it seems. But, they are the first in line to get anything and everything they can and cry "foul" when they don't. Utter hypocrisy!

[klmebane]

*Apparently, it's fine for the poor and middle class to struggle without help from natural disasters, without national health insurance and with the brutal effects of least common denominator competition. And, we should "'suck it up" and do it without "whining," it seems. But, they are the first in line to get anything and everything they can and cry "foul" when they don't. Utter hypocrisy!*

very well said. i don't understand how they are able to look at themselves in the mirror and see a "righteous" person. they scream god this, god that, sin, fire & brimstone blah blah blah, and then turn around and the exact same shit in a different form. whether it's liquidy or in huge chunks... shit is shit. why do they quibble about it? either you want everyone to have it , or you're a selfish ass who says other folks gotta stop bitching because they can't get the same stuff i bitch to make sure i have. god they make me sick. if there was a god he'd strike them down. they need to be the ones worried about going to "hell."

[normathumb]

Actually, if you learned from your niece because she was there, she knows it first hand and you know it second hand.

[AceInTheHole]

THE SIGNS KEEP GETTING CLEARER AND CLEARER THAT THESE LOWER THAN SNAIL CRAP, UNREPENTED MISCREANT SKALLYWAGS, ARE ON THE FAST LANE TO SELF CONDEMNATION THAT ONLY THE LORD CAN REDEEM THEM FROM. MAY HE HELP THEM COME TO THEIR SENSES AND CHANGE THEIR WAYS, SO HE CAN HAVE MERCY ON THEIR NOW PITIFUL SOULS.

[research]

WHAT??? I CAN"T HEAR YOU< SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING ALL CAPS!!!!

[yellowdogSC]

re,

Yes, my eyes ache, too.

But it's worth it, because according to the BIO this person is a "MAJOR SAGE!"

And how often do you get one of those?

OOOMMMMMMM
OOOMMMMMMM

[acanthus]

Foreign aid, New Orleans. Stop playing around. Yeah, I know there's supposed to be some kind of law against it. Break it.

[kraimie]

We should secede and then appeal to France to take us back. But I can find very few who support this idea -- except as a slogan.