Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) has been boiling over at President George Bush’s less than A+ hurricane performance. The lady who styles herself "a daughter of the Crescent City" has been raging at "the staggering incompetence of the national government."
To listen to the Senator you might think she was a regular Hans Brinker, the little Dutch boy who kept his finger in the dike and saved Holland. There is even a statue of that small hero somewhere, but, alas, he is unalloyed fiction. And so is the hero role the Senator has written for herself. Not only that but she herself has something to answer for in the destruction of her hometown where her daddy was the mayor.
According to the Washington Post, Louisiana has received more Army Corps of Engineers money than any other state. Almost two billion bucks, but it didn’t go to getting New Orleans ready for the big one. The Post says, “Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon. . . after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations.”
Oh, Mary, Mary, could it be that you were taking some campaign bling-bling from the barge and shipping interests? Do you think you might have done something like that? Let’s hope not, but if you did next time you are in front of the cameras wailing at Bush, try self flagellation.
But what she says of herself is, "I was not crying in anguish because the home that I walked out of with my children was gone - I knew it would be gone when I left. It was an anguished cry... to the only person that I thought could hear, and that was God himself.” Honey, God takes care of himself. You worry about the voters.