Let it be known that more PROOF of the pessimistic and derogatory mindset of THE LEFT
has been documented by a poll. From a poll released by ABC News, of all organizations.
55% of those polled do not blame President Bush for the storm’s devastation, and although 67% think the federal government wasn’t “adequately prepared,” 75% say the same thing about state and local government.
People in this country that are spending their time running down the President are wasting everybodies time and simply driving a wedge between themselves and anyone that may be paying attention and have thoughts about voting Democrat next year.
Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to describe themselves as “shocked” (68% to 42%), “angry” (63% to 27%) and “ashamed” (63% to 28%) at the response to Katrina, while Republicans were far more “hopeful” (80% to 50%) and “proud” (43% to 17%).
Go read the article for yourselves, and if you are a liberal, or a democrat, or just don’t like Bush, the Right or believe the garbage spilling out about how horrid and evil Bush&Co are then go cry in your Granola and Soy Milk you whiny bitches.
If you are on, in and of the Right, go dance!!!
Crossposted at Kenders and Conservative Angst.
You’d be proud of me. I actually watched Fox News last night — hearing Sean Hannity talking to the senator of NO and all.
Well – that’s great T-Bug; did you learn the following?
The truth is never told … (emailed to me by a Journalist friend who actually went there!)
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious — you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern — the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists – myself included – did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding … but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster — it’s a man-made disaster. The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong. The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days … it happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view. The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency – indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people — they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America … in fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems … this is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story — “Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire … “Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.” ‘These troops are … under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ “
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them … it looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome? Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America.
“The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl” — the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels — gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense — 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects.
Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact — early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails – so they just let many of them loose… there is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations – that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit — but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals — and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep — on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary … but in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters — not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell — in fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite — the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face.
They don’t sit around and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them … they don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? Living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state – and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages – is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans … and that is the story that no one is reporting.
Bad logic. Just because people see things differently does not mean they are pessimistic and derogatory. You also shouldn’t categorize the entire left that way. I mean, most Americans know now that the evidence about Iraq having WMDs or the evidence linking Iraq to 9/11 was absolutely false and nonexistant. I am willing to venture my reputation that those who do not know about this nor believe it are most certainly of the right persuasion. Can I therefore categorize the entire right as naive, ignorant, mislead, etc? My point is, the national, state, and local governments were all woefully unprepared for this event, and if people don’t believe this, then I am going to suggest that they are because they refuse to be pessimistic and derogatory, but because they are naive, ignorant, mislead, etc. That is just my opinion though. Sorry if I offended anyone. Please feel free to disagree.
I started reading your point timnayer and it was getting good until you got to the evidence part linking WMD’s. False and non-existent? Do you know this for a fact? Show me where we erred. Saddam used gas on the Kurds. That is a fact. What did he use it all up? If he didn’t have them then why’d he **** with weapons inspectors for a decade? You know where the Ba’athists that Saddam was part of come from? Syria…
So why don’t we go into Syria? Well geez, they aren’t going around and taking over countries on their border or attacking their neighbors (though insurgents are coming from there). Iraq was a threat to the world security and all you bleeding heart liberals are too ignorant about it. When 50% of the worlds economic juice is underground the last thing you need is a dictator sitting of the top of it.
Sgt, looks like you’re feeling a little better today.
Anyway, here’s where I’m eye to eye with the Republicans:
I am sometimes thinking to myself that welfare should be kicked to the curb. The government does so much for these people, and they are still complaining.
And I’m also aware that percentage-wise that the poverty stricken bunch is more likely to commit crimes. It’s a repeated cycle: Low income, little education, growing up in a violent home causing the cycle to repeat itself because these people will take it out on people like us. They will have children, beat the **** out of them, and the cycle goes on and on and on.
Yes, this IS a generalization that I’m making. This is not to say that all low income, low educated people brought up in a violent upbringing will lead them to take out their problems on society.
Everyone copes with their “baggage” in a different way. Some people cope by devoting their whole lives to helping others.
The bottom line here is that most of this leads to criminal behavior. While I understand the “why’s”, I am in no way validating rape, theft, and murder. I actually have very extremist views on how to stop this. I say kill them all! I say, stop the welfare because that doesn’t seem to be helping anyone. Our Justice System is way too easy on our criminals. Wayyyyy to easy.
We may live in a Conservative Nation, but we are run by bleeding hearts regarding criminal behavior.
If we stopped welfare, the Mexicans wouldn’t survive here, sir. We need the Mexicans to want to come here illegally so that they can aid businesses. It’s all Capitalism gone bad, in my opinion. Mexicans don’t even get deported for their crimes here and we aren’t even allowed to ask about their “legal status” because it would be politically incorrect. We get accused of being racists! Pathetic! See what I mean about our little bleeding heart country. And this, sir is where Bush is WRONG. If he wanted to control the borders, he could do so easily.
Those borders need to be shut down and only open to those who have the proper documentation to live and work here! But no… they get there driver’s licenses, their free education, low cost housing, loans for mortgages, and welfare to boot while they are popping out one baby after the next. And your tax dollars are supporting this.
You see what I’m trying to say here. These illegal aliens are living better than we are! What ever happened to “personal responsibility”. An 87 year old woman dying outside the Superdome in NO needs to “fend for herself”. An 18 month year old wading in her excretions dying of thirst needs to “fend for herself”, little girls getting raped in the Superdome need to “fend for themselves” because that’s not what our government about. But you get a Mexican? He’s spoiled to death. They don’t need to “fend for themselves”. We kiss the ground that they walk on in the name of “Capitalism”.
Something’s wrong with this picture.
And guess who’s following behind them at our borders? Yep, Al Quida and Company. They’re seeping through the cracks while nothing’s being done about it. We’ve got Minutemen out there volunteering their time to stop this while Bush, in his armchair, is calling us vigilantes. WTF?
This is a HUGE PROBLEM – especially when we’re “trying to win the war” on terrorism.
Sorry for the tangent — back to Law and Order
I miss the guillotine, the gas chambers, the electric chair. I believe in the “cruel and unusual” punishment.
You see, this is where Liberals hate me.
You need to understand that even some of us Libs don’t agree with each other. I am unable to join any of the Liberal Web Rings out there because of some of my views on things. That’s why I get hot and heavy when some of you Repubs lump us all together.
Anyway, I am a bleeding heart but have no tolerance for thugs.
Also I was also aware that NO had the highest rate of crime in the nation, and that even the police over there were corrupt.
Who do I feel sorry for? The defenseless law abiding citizens that got trapped amongst the lowly criminals. Do I blame Bush for that? Nope. Never said I did either.
Tim, take a look here. “No WMD” as far as I’m concerned is just as stupid a claim as “Bush lied” (on that, take a look here, here and here and here.) or no Al Qaeda/Bin Laden/Saddam connection (listen to this 1999 ABC tape or take a look at some of the documentation at this website). All 3 of the leftist claims have been debunked, and not just recently–a long time ago the leftist lies became obvious. Now here is some of what we know about the discoveries of WMD in Iraq (which are far from nonexistent):
# A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and “that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N.” Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn’t have a biological-weapons program?
# “Reference strains” of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. “We thought it was a big deal,” a senior administration official said. “But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of ’starter set.’”
# New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
# A line of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, “not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit.”
# “Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N.”
# “Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] – well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates].”
# In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made “clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles – probably the No Dong – 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment,” Kay reported.
From Douglas Hanson, who was the Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Science and Technology for the Coalition Provisional Authority during the Summer of 2003. As then, the Iraqi-controlled ministry today has oversight of Al-Tuwaitha and its 3000 scientists and engineers of the now-disbanded Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.
He points out in this article that–the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), (the UN’s nuclear watchdog) not only knew about the 1.8 tons of enriched uranium that we air-lifted out of Tawaitha in 2004, the 500 tons of yellow cake, and the 300 tons of radioisotopes. These materials, numbering over 1000 radioactive items retrieved from the site (Tawaitha), included Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60. Both are extremely radioactive substances that are ideal for use in Radiological Dispersal Devices (RDD), or “dirty bombs.”
The UN and its so-called nuclear watchdog agency have proven again that they are not about preventing the proliferation of WMD, but in reality, unwittingly or intentionally, assist rogue nations’ nuclear weapons programs.
Other WMDs found:
a 155-mm mortar shell containing Sarin gas
a shell containing mustard gas
Chemical weapons lab and thousands of gallons of chemical weapons precursors
August, 2005-Aug. 13 – U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.
See also Yeah, right, no WMD.
When coalition forces entered Iraq, “huge warehouses and caches of ‘commercial and agricultural’ chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists,” Hanson writes. “What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches.”
Caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals don’t match the expectation of “stockpiles” of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. “At a very minimum,” Hanson tells Insight, “they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly.”
Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment’s notice. At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a “camouflaged bunker complex” that was shown to reporters — with unpleasant results.
“More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent,” Hanson says. “But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The ‘agricultural site’ was also colocated with a military ammunition dump — evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.”
As far as I’m concerned, the old media can no longer deny the enormous evidence to the contrary of their “no wmd” claim. But they’re in denial; they still don’t “get” the fact that they can no longer lie to the public.