Bad Facts Weaken the Conservative Cause
By Letters To The Editor K.C. King (09/13/06)
Re: Senator Inhofe: Transportation, Work and Achievement By Paul M. Weyrich (09/12/2006)
( http://americandaily.com/article/15523 )
In an otherwise well-reasoned appreciation of Senator Inhofe’s work, Mr. Weyrich introduced an unfounded and unnecessary misstatement of facts that calls into question the credibility anything else he might have said.
The misstatement in question regards the flood protection services provided by the Army Corps of Engineers and asserts is that “Money was appropriated to fix those infamous levies in New Orleans but local politicians always diverted the money to their own projects and now we are all paying the price.” The facts of the matter, as portrayed by the Corps’ own study and supported by the American Society of Civil Engineers external review are that the money was spent on levees to protect New Orleans but, because of grievous errors in engineering design, the levees failed to provide the protection authorized by Congress.
The Corps’ interagency report released in June 2006 found no instances of funds being diverted. If this had occurred, which it didn’t, perhaps Mr Weyrich might have found that the Congress had failed to exercise the oversight of how our taxes are spent which, as we all know, is just as important as infrastructure spending itself. We should expect the government to either provide the protection they paid for and the citizens of New Orleans were assured they would receive or report back to Congress that they couldn’t do the job - for what ever reason. The result of this man-made disaster in New Orleans was that not only did the appropriations not result in the expected return of investment, they led to hundreds of thousands of American citizens losing everything they had including their homes, possessions, jobs and, in some cases their lives. While the levee failure victims in New Orleans are grateful for compensation, Americans should be aware that Federal assistance won’t cover but a small fraction of their losses to what, in the end, comes down to poorly supervised, incompetent infrastructure engineering.
K.C. King,
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