PrintNYT hits bottom
The pictures of the dispossessed of New Orleans, mostly poor and black , has to strike a responsive chord with all who see the horror they are living in. But the New York Times sees it as yet another occasion to bash Bush, suggesting through selective quotes of Administration critics, that the Administration doesn't care about them because they are black and vote Democratic
Perhaps someone should remind the editors who are so busy writing corrections to Krugman's fabulist columns that the President declared Katrina a disaster and freed emergency up funds before Katrina hit, called the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana to ask them to evacuate the city. Instead, Mayor Nagin chose to put the poor in harm's way by housing them in the Superdome which, as we predicted, would be a disaster.
It's true the disaster is uniquely severe but the local operations on the ground are hardly inspiring praise for the Democratic Mayor and Governor elected by those they left behind..
To date, the left's carping has taken three tacks, each of which has proven nonsensical: that if we'd signed Kyoto there wouldn't be global warming and therefore there wouldn't be such a severe hurricane; that had Bush not cut requested levee funding, the levees would have held; that if the troops weren't in Iraq they'd have been on hand to deal more efficiently with the disaster.
But as foolish as those charges have proven to be, the latest charge is even lower. Calling it scraping the bottom of the barrel would be hyperbolic. It is lower than that.
Clarice Feldman 9 02 05
