Pathetic Liberals invoke Katrina into Roberts Hearing...who didn't see that coming?

[Drbio]

Contentious start to Roberts hearings
By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 12, 2005

ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC....

It took less than an hour before Senators considering federal Judge John G. Roberts Jr.'s nomination to the Supreme Court fell into disagreement over Hurricane Katrina.
In their opening remarks, the two top Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee invoked the tragedy as a reminder of the gap between rich and poor and the need for a Supreme Court that wants to close that gap.
"Today, the devastation, despair facing millions of our fellow Americans in the Gulf region is a tragic reminder of why we have a federal government, why it's critical that our government be responsive," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and ranking minority member of the panel.
"We need the federal government for our protection and security, to cast a lifeline to those in distress, to mobilize better resources beyond the ability of any state and local government -- all of this for the common good."
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, said lessons should be learned from the hurricane.
"The powerful winds and flood waters of Katrina tore away the mask that has hidden from public view the many Americans who are left out and left behind," he said. "As one nation under God, we cannot continue to ignore the injustice, the inequality and the gross disparities that exist in our society."
Within moments, the office of Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and member of the committee, issued a statement accusing Mr. Leahy and Mr. Kennedy of using the victims of the hurricane "in an attempt to score political points."
"I believe the American people will see this for what it is," said Mr. Cornyn, according to the statement. "We ought not to appropriate a national tragedy in a misguided effort to further a political interest of any sort."
Wendy Long, counsel for the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, accused the Democrats of "exploiting the national tragedy."
"Reasonable, fair-minded Democrats should prevail on their more extremist Senate colleagues to back off these inappropriate tactics," she said. "Grandstanding, deception and cavalierly playing politics with the human tragedy wrought by the hurricane will not endear Senate Democrats to the American people."
The Cornyn statement went on to predict: "Others likely will make similar attempts in a bizarre effort to link Judge Roberts to the tragedies in the Gulf of Mexico. But Katrina victims should not be used to score political points."

[reeds]

pathetic? Someone has to fight for the poor- its obvious it isnt Mr. Bush- the "tax cut for the rich" king!!! That is what is truly pathetic..

[kg_veteran]

reeds - Do you think the welfare system has really benefitted the poor of New Orleans? If anything has been unmasked, it is the man-made disaster created by the welfare state long before Katrina ever struck.

[LRB]

The welfare system keeps people alive, but works to hold them back from becoming self sufficient and prospering beyond just surving. But it's an excellent way of keeping the poor, poor.

[Mavdog]

these speeches merely used katrina to emphasise a point, not to use katrina to blame anybody for anything. just illustrative in regard to the vulnerable poor.

as far as "the welfare system", what exactly do you mean by that phrase?

[LRB]

Originally posted by: Mavdog
these speeches merely used katrina to emphasise a point, not to use katrina to blame anybody for anything. just illustrative in regard to the vulnerable poor.

The point is that they have nothing to do with the confirmation of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. All judges, but most especially the Supreme Court justices are charged with blindly applying the law with out regard to wealth or status.

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: LRB

The point is that they have nothing to do with the confirmation of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. All judges, but most especially the Supreme Court justices are charged with blindly applying the law with out regard to wealth or status.

The comments have everything to do with the role of the federal government, not "applying the law without reard to wealth and status".

[kg_veteran]

Originally posted by: Mavdog
these speeches merely used katrina to emphasise a point, not to use katrina to blame anybody for anything. just illustrative in regard to the vulnerable poor.

as far as "the welfare system", what exactly do you mean by that phrase?

Merely used Katrina to emphasize a point? Surely you're not that naive. Moreover, it isn't the job of the Supreme Court to "close the gap" between the rich and the poor. Frankly, that isn't the job of the federal government as a whole, either. Redistribution of wealth is a communist and socialist concept.

As far as the "welfare system," I'll just refer you to the following article which I think sums it up nicely:

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
link

Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual Activist.

It took 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 also took me four long days to figure out what was 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 is 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 four days last week. 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 a SWAT team 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 speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

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 one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, 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 those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that 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. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

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 incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. 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. And 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? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

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.

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: kg_veteran
Merely used Katrina to emphasize a point? Surely you're not that naive. Moreover, it isn't the job of the Supreme Court to "close the gap" between the rich and the poor. Frankly, that isn't the job of the federal government as a whole, either. Redistribution of wealth is a communist and socialist concept.

the remarks had nothing to do with "redistribution of wealth" but the need for a federal role in aiding the lower income citizens.

As far as the "welfare system," I'll just refer you to the following article which I think sums it up nicely:

so the "welfare system" is defined as public housing?

These lines are reflective of distorted viewpoint of the writer:

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.

hmm, so crime is merely a function of public housing, and public housing occupants produce the jail populaion? therefore where there is no public housing the jails are empty? no, that isn't the case.

In a city corrupted by the welfare state

so the City of New Orleans failed to adequately respond to the crisis because they had public housing projects that somehow distorted the official's mission? very interesting.

Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department

the "welfare system" was responsible for those police officers who cracked? it had nothing to do with the stress of seeing their homes destroyed, their families evacuated, and the chaos that resulted?

[kg_veteran]

Another good article:

Bush's foes smell blood
by Mike Rosen
September 16, 2005

link

Whatever the shortcomings of the Bush administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies in responding to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans, it's now clear to any fair-minded observer that the major responsibility for the failure to adequately prepare, to order a mandatory evacuation earlier and to respond to those left behind belongs to local authorities, specifically New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Predictably, partisan Democrats, media liberals and pathological Bush-haters have ignored or downplayed Nagin's and Blanco's culpability and focused their attacks on President Bush. Their strategy is transparent. It's about much more than New Orleans.

It's about Social Security reform, repeal of the death tax, the war in Iraq, Supreme Court nominations, drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nuclear energy, global warming, the Kyoto Treaty, expansion of the welfare state, abortion, gay marriage and most anything else on the president's legislative and policy agenda. It's all about the destruction of the Bush presidency.

With casualties mounting in Iraq, rising oil prices, always-present economic uncertainty and stalled legislative initiatives, Bush's popularity ratings are dropping in public opinion polls. The president's opponents smell blood in the water and they've seized on New Orleans as the long-hoped-for deathblow to derail the Bush agenda.

New Orleans has become a rubric for a host of political causes. The left sees it as an object lesson in the virtue of collectivism over individualism; a demonstration of the essential need for ever bigger government. Never mind that the object lesson, here, is just the opposite.

New Orleans has long been infamous as the model for corrupt government in the name of populism. Billions of dollars of federal aid that have poured into the state over the years could have been put to much better use in flood prevention than the pork barrel projects to which it was diverted. Hucksters of the politics of racism have contrived a conspiracy theory of indifference toward blacks in the city by white America. (The same white America that sent billions to aid the nonwhite victims of the recent Asian Tsunami.) Jesse Jackson and his ilk have made a career out of this.

Another drumbeat has been the poverty angle, with the goal of expanding the welfare state. ABC reporter Chris Cuomo intoned, "Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the most economically destructive event in America since the Great Depression, the last time the country responded with unprecedented sweeping changes to help the least fortunate. Today may demand an equal effort." A Newsweek cover story, "Poverty, Race & Katrina: Lessons of a National Shame," lamented our stinginess toward the poor. A Denver Post editorial asserted "the need for America to declare war on the nation's growing poverty problem."

Of course we'll help the victims of Katrina in New Orleans and elsewhere. There's already been a spectacular outpouring of private and corporate generosity and people welcoming evacuees into their homes. But let's not go off the deep end on public policy.

Lyndon Johnson launched the "war on poverty" 40 years ago. The Post must have missed the official declaration. Since then, government has spent upward of $10 trillion on more than 75 different state and federal poverty programs. Federal poverty spending in 2005 alone is more than $400 billion, an increase of 42 percent since Bush took office in 2001. Yet poverty still exists, and always will. It's a relative term, especially in a free and wealthy nation like ours. The essential point is that there is nothing approaching abject poverty in this country. Most of the "poor" in America enjoy more material comforts than Europe's middle class and live like nobility compared to the underdeveloped world's poor. Don't be misled by Census Bureau statistics labeling 37 million Americans as "poor." The definition is oversimplified and the figures overstated.

A med school student living off checks from Mom and Dad is statistically poor, as are many elderly couples with net worth in six figures. Poor households consume twice as much as their official earnings, which exclude billions of dollars in noncash government entitlements like Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies and unreported income. There are many more pitfalls in the data.

Poverty is more a matter of prospects than income. It's a transitory condition for most. According to a Census Bureau study between 1996 and 1999, 80 percent of those under the poverty line were above it in less than a year.

The danger of government poverty programs is that they can seduce their wards into dependency, draining them of ambition and personal responsibility. The last thing we should learn from New Orleans is to expand the poverty trap.

[LRB]

The danger of government poverty programs is that they can seduce their wards into dependency, draining them of ambition and personal responsibility. The last thing we should learn from New Orleans is to expand the poverty trap.

Government poverty programs are like the Berlin Wall was. They're not made so much to protect as they are to keep in.

[LRB]

The danger of government poverty programs is that they can seduce their wards into dependency, draining them of ambition and personal responsibility. The last thing we should learn from New Orleans is to expand the poverty trap.

Government poverty programs are like the Berlin Wall was. They're not made so much to protect as they are to keep in.