Fisking Newsweek About Katrina

The left, and the major news outlets that are part of them, continue to operate under the "big lie" philosophy--tell a lie often enough and loud enough and eventually everyone will believe it.

Everyone but Jeff Goldstein, apparently.

He has taken a Newsweek article about the federal response to Katrina and fisked it, almost paragraph by paragraph. Some of the comments are classics, too. I personally like this comment, and it's not even as good as the full post:

The quote above states that FEMA manages the “federal response and recovery efforts.” The Feds weren’t responsible for Louisiana’s National Guard. The Feds didn’t keep the Red Cross out. The Feds don’t own over 20,000 buses in Louisiana. The Feds don’t run New Orleans’ police department. The Feds didn’t close the Gretna bridge.

Did Newsweek say where the New Orleans police are vacationing this week?

The fact staring the MSM in the face is that New Orleans is the quintessential Democratic city.

And what about this comment?

Here comes the 21st century race pimp, Barack Obama:

Obama was asked on ABC’s “This Week” whether there was racism in the lack of evacuation planning for poor, black residents of New Orleans. He said he would not refer to the government response in that way, but said there was a much deeper, long-term neglect.

“Whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner city life in New Orleans ... that they couldn’t conceive of the notion that they couldn’t load up their SUV’s, put $100 worth of gas in there, put some sparkling water and drive off to a hotel and check in with a credit card,” Obama said.

“There seemed to be a sense that this other America was somehow not on people’s radar screen. And that, I think, does have to do with historic indifference on the part of government to the plight of those who are disproportionately African-American.” He added that “passive indifference is as bad as active malice."

Let’s see, senator. “Whoever was in charge of planning” was… a black democrat mayor and a white democrat governor.

The point of the post is that there are a lot of people screaming about how terrible the federal response was, but not all that much talk about specifically what the feds should have done better. And there's plenty of evidence that federal response times were about what they've been in other disasters, ones in which you didn't have lefties screaming (for Bush's head).

Additionally, many people want to forget that we do not have a central government, we have a federal government. The distinction is quite important. The states are not components of the central government; they're sovereign entities that form part of a federal republic. For the President to have done some of the things (primarily with the military) that lefties are now crying that he should have done, he'd have had to have broken US law. Clearly, in this case the people of New Orleans couldn't count on their local or state governments. Best politicians money can buy, as my native New Orleans friend Mike used to joke? I hardly think so. Their local and state governments did *nothing* to help them until the feds got there, leaving them to founder for days. Sad. We live in a federal republic; too many people forget that and want Uncle Sugar to be responsible for everything.

Why are we hearing so much about New Orleans, though? The hurricane skirted New Orleans, which was spared its full force. Directly in the path was Mississippi, cities like Pascagoula and Biloxi. Why are we not hearing so much about the utter devastation there? Could it be because local and state governments there did what the citizens expected them to, helped out and held on until help from the feds was on the way? Could it be because the governor of Mississippi is the former chairman of the Republican Party? Inquiring minds want to know.