Playing the Katrina race card is both unproductive and unhelpful
By Brian Yates (09/27/05)
Do Democrats really want the guy who sings “Crack Music” handing out the party talking points?
Kanye West told a national NBC audience that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” and the left has picked up on the theme faster than Ted Kennedy leaving a crime scene.
Al Sharpton told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that, “if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.”
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson told Tim Russert that “reasonable blacks” believe the Bush Administration engineered the levee breaks in order to save white neighborhoods and drown black communities.
The pastor without a church, Jesse Jackson claimed “the Red Cross will not go in there because it is too dangerous. The rescue has been slow because some see us as foreigners and 2/3 human.”
DNC Chair Howard Dean, no stranger to the foot-in-mouth club, joined Club Kanye saying the Bush’s response to Katrina showed “the ugly truth that skin color…played a significant role in who survived and who did not.”
And a Louisville Cardinal columnist blogged on his website that hurricane victims in New Orleans should “shoot every cop, National Guard, and politician who stands in your way, including George W. Bush if need be.”
They must be listening: MSNBC’s Carl Quintenella reported that FEMA had to suspend operations in many areas because of gunfire at rescue helicopters.
The only person to not receive the memo was Al Gore. Not that he wasn’t joining the blame Bush game; he was. But he was focused on global warming. This, of course, is also George Bush’s fault for having the audacity to reject the Kyoto treaty. (How large a problem was global warming in 1900 when Galveston was totally destroyed by a hurricane?)
While the media has insisted on fingering someone – preferably Bush – for the blame; the facts tell a different story.
Following Hurricane Andrew, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in Homestead, Florida. Troops had established a Gulf Coast presence in only three days after Katrina.
The week after the levee broke, more than 32,000 people had been rescued, the levees were repaired and water was being pumped out of New Orleans, and more than 180,000 storm victims received shelter, food, and medical care. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina was unprecedented.
The images from within the Superdome and Convention Center were certainly horrific. But to blame Bush – or even FEMA for that matter – is uninformed. When the Red Cross had “trucks with water, food, hygiene equipment” ready to be delivered to the two locations, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco (a Democrat) refused to allow them in.
Fox News’ Major Garret reported that “at the same time local officials were screaming where is the food, where is the water, the Red Cross was standing by ready and the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security said you can’t go.”
FEMA has received the brunt of the blame for not evacuating people who were otherwise unable to leave New Orleans. FEMA’s responsibility is to come in after the storm and assist with recovery. The pre-storm preparation is the responsibility of state and local officials who were, sadly for those still in the area, totally unprepared. Two-thousand New Orleans school buses drowned in several feet of water because Mayor Ray Nagin (who is black) did not use them to take citizens out of the city.
Not everyone has attempted to play the race card following Hurricane Katrina. Joseph Brant, a black man who lost everything to Katrina and was forced to evacuate to Houston told Reuters after receiving a ride from a “group of white folks” that, “Before this whole thing I had a complex about white people; this thing changed me forever.”
Race has nothing to do with the disaster affecting the Gulf Coast. At a country concert I attended recently, thousands of dollars were collected for the Red Cross. The Florida State - Miami football game expected to collect $1 million for relief efforts. People all across America – white and black and everything in between – have donated money, food, clothing, and even space in their own homes to evacuees.
Some want to exploit this tragedy in an attempt to divide America and play on the fears of the people most afflicted. Others simply want to help those who need it.
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