Posted on 10/05/2005 10:44:12 AM PDT by smoothsailing
October 05, 2005, 8:12 a.m.
Grand Wizard Bush
"Bull Connor" Katrina crap.
As levees crumbled in New Orleans after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, so, too, tumbled any sense of decorum among key black Democrats. Officials and activists alike are re-submerging the Crescent City in a fact-free torrent of vitriol.
"George Bush is our Bull Connor," Rep. Charles Rangel of New York told cheering Congressional Black Caucus conventioneers on September 22. "If you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience. It's a death sentence."
Rangel equated Republican President Bush to Theophilus "Bull" Connor, Birmingham, Alabama's former segregationist police commissioner who notoriously used attacks dogs and fire hoses to disrupt civil rights marches by Martin Luther King Jr. and other protesters in 1963. As is Rangel, Bull Connor was a Democrat.
Other black race baiters riffed on this theme. The Rev. Al Sharpton said, "if there is a person that is a symbol that many blacks organize around and organize against in this generation, it would be Bush." He added: "We've gone from fire hoses to levees."
"This is worse than Bull Connor," said Rep. Major Owens (D., N.Y.). "Bull Connor didn't even pretend that he cared about African Americans," Owens continued. "You have to give it to George Bush for being even more diabolical." Owens believes that Bush's faith-based initiatives "made it appear that he cared about black Americans. Katrina has exposed that as a big lie."
Gotham City Councilman Charles Barron (D., Brooklyn), a former Black Panther, said "George Bush is worse" than Connor "because he has more power and he's more destructive to our people than Bull Connor will ever be…A KKK without power is not as bad as a George Bush with power." Barron added: "What he did in New Orleans — I mean, that's worse than what Bull Connor did in his entire career as a racist in the South…Look at these neighborhoods before Katrina hit. Bush made that community what it is. Katrina did the rest, in partnership with Bush, to deliver the final blow."
As Barron suggested, I asked Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst Kirk Johnson to look at these neighborhoods. While Bush has taken responsibility for Washington's disjointed first response to Katrina — notwithstanding the 33,544 hurricane survivors who U.S. Coast Guard helicopter and boat crews started saving as soon as winds dropped below 45 MPH — he need not apologize for neglecting the Big Easy's poor before these hurricanes.
Using the Consolidated Federal Funds Report's latest data, Johnson found that, "Across all federal programs, Orleans Parish received $12,645 per capita in fiscal year 2003. At the same time, the national average was $7,089 per capita. Put another way, New Orleans received 78.4 percent more funding per person than the national average."
Johnson also examined 21 low-income-assistance programs. Among them, inflation-adjusted federal poverty spending in Orleans Parish equaled $5,899 per-poor-person in Bill Clinton's final, full-fiscal-year 2000 budget. By fiscal 2003, such outlays soared to $10,222. Under Bush, federal anti-poverty spending per-poor-New Orleanian ballooned 73.3 percent, or an average, annual hike of 24.4 percent over three years!
Johnson discovered, for instance, that spending on Immunization Grants dropped 80.51 percent, and Supportive Housing for the Elderly fell 25.6 percent during Bush's first three years. However, Child Support Enforcement grew 8.3 percent. Head Start rose 13.8 percent. Food Stamps increased 43.1 percent. Pell Grants advanced 126 percent. Community Health Center funding accelerated 163.6 percent, and so on.
In 1999, under Clinton, Orleans Parish had 135,429 poor people and a 27.9 percent poverty rate. In 2004, under Bush, 102,636 New Orleanians were poor, while the poverty rate eased to 23.2 percent. So, pre-Katrina, the Big Easy's poverty rate slid 16.8 percent during Bush's tenure. What was that about the KKK?
"If program spending is the way to judge whether or not Washington cares about New Orleans," Johnson says, "then a lot of love has come to New Orleans in recent years."
Most free-marketeers criticize these programs and instead advocate entrepreneurship, private-sector job creation, and private property ownership. That said, Bush's and the GOP Congress' lavish spending on New Orleans' mainly black poor belies Rangel & Co.'s neo-segregationist paranoia.
"People from my Harlem chapter had many encounters with Bull Connor," recalls Roy Innis, National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. Innis was a Freedom Rider who risked his life to register black voters in the early 1960s. "It perverts the verity of language and the verity of decency to equate the hideous behavior of Bull Connor with President Bush — a man who has appointed Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and so many other blacks to high office."
The sad truth is that many of those pulled from rooftops and deposited at the Superdome and Convention Center were poor long before George W. Bush ran for president. They were poor throughout Bill Clinton's eight years of Truth and Beauty, for which these crackpots probably pine. And they likely would be poor in 2012 had Katrina sputtered, and Hillary Clinton followed John Kerry into the Oval Office.
Largely under black, Democratic leadership, the Crescent City's poor endured derelict schools (of which Baton Rouge has declared 70 among 127 "academically unacceptable"), fatherless homes, municipal corruption, and, at least until lately, a business-hostile economic climate. These and other factors hobbled low-income New Orleanians. In my 13 visits to one of America's most seductive locales, I found that part of New Orleans' enduring allure was its mysterious blend of fragile gentility, an atmosphere of elegant decay, and a sense of potentially imminent misfortune. The music-filled streets with ancient houses that tilted almost subliminally to one side masked far deeper troubles. Addressing them took hard work then, and will take even harder work now.
Rather than pitch in, Rangel, Sharpton, Owen, Barron, and other friction-mongers plunge steak knives into old racial wounds and exhume the memory of a long-dead bigot to inflame Americans who hardly need their generosity diluted with venom.
While every American should row forward on behalf of Katrina's and Rita's victims, we now must paddle in circles while these race hustlers spill untreated sewage by the barrel. Who does this hurt? The same black New Orleanians whose plight they exploit.
I worry that some have heard these comparisons of Bush to Bull Connor, watched those German Shepherds snarl in black-and-white, shaken their heads in disgust, closed their checkbooks, and moved on. Rather than encourage compassion for those who still desperately need it, Rangel & Co. promote a meat-cleaver-like divisiveness that surely is slowing, not speeding, aid to the Katrina and Rita Zones.
For their counterproductive, hyper-partisan grandstanding, these so-called "black leaders" deserve merciless excoriation from coast to coast.
— Deroy Murdock, a veteran of the 1980 and 1984 Reagan for President campaigns, is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200510050812.asp
Bullzogby?
Or perhaps Bullhillary.
Bull Zogby and Zogbyism have been my terms for the media distortions. Far more widespread than McCarthyism was. Far more wrong in the presenation. Far more overlooked in today's schools.
Damn good article. I don't know one educated middle class black person who likes these yahoos....all they do is do their best to keep the average blackman down so they can keep themselves up and living high on the hog off their brother's misery. In a different time in a different place these guys would have fitted in well into the Nazi (a leftist org) party.
All Right that does it, I'm gonna have to use the "N Word"...........Nincompoops!
lot of this is the media's fault. They always provide a venue for the same people instead of finding authentic voices.
Speaking for one who has closed his checkbook I say Screw New Orleans. If I can help in Alabama or Mississippi I will, but not one penny for New Orleans. Intelligent people would say push the houses down that got flooded, bury them under dirt ,plant grass and make it parkland. Go somewhere uphill and rebuild. The only reason I can see for anyone returning is that they wont forward their welfare check.
On the news today I hear La. has identified 61 bodies of the almost 1,000 so far found.Yet in Miss. something like 190 out of 230 have been identified.It's not just NO, the state of La. has a problem with competent leadership.The only way so many bodies can remain unidentified has to be the state blocking the process,IMO.
"If you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience. It's a death sentence."
--Lets just add Rep. Charles Rangel of New York , to the many ignorant racists who claim to be leaders in this country.
Largely under black, Democratic leadership, the Crescent City's poor endured derelict schools (of which Baton Rouge has declared 70 among 127 "academically unacceptable"), fatherless homes, municipal corruption, and, at least until lately, a business-hostile economic climate
--The blacks might want to look into who is really leading them to ruins. It says largely under BLACK leadership.
Well you have to realise that in Mississippi many of those identified have families who care. In New Orleans we have criminals, homeless, unemployed, vagrants and other ne'er do wells no one really wants to identify anyway because they might have to pay for a funeral.
I sincerely hope this is just ignorance talking because New Orleans is not just what you saw on TV. More middle class and upper income people lost homes and property than did lower income people.
Check out one day the economic impact that area has on the country. Ask the farmers how their wheat and corn is getting out of the country right now on foreign sales. Oh its not because the port is mostly closed still here.
In my office, a software firm that does contracting with the federal government, fully half the people here all earning well above the average income are now homeless and fighting to stay above water figuratively and in some cases literally.
This kind of Screw New Orleans dont rebuild it chatter is stupid. Lets say the same for every area that is affected by a disaster, natural or caused by men. Then lets slit our own throats, because thats just as productive.
My concern is with the corruption and incompetence of political leadership that has permeated Louisana.
I want New Orleans rebuilt.I just don't want the Blancos,Landrieus,Nagins,or the the other race hustlers and poverty pimps calling the shots.
Good read smoothsailing.
"Look at these neighborhoods before Katrina hit. Bush made that community what it is."
No, the citizens of New Orleans made it what it was. NO ONE forces anyone to live a certain way. YOU choose to. If things were so bad why didn't they get jobs or do ANYTHING to try and better themselves? Quit blaming Bush for everything that goes wrong. Step up and take some responsibility for your own destination.
But it also is a sure way to gain self-esteem. That is the real reward that the entitlement crowd is missing out on.
Sorry you think I am stupid, But I still say building house below sea level and expecting federal tax dollars to build levees to keep the water out is stupid. The houses there are gone now. Moving them to higher ground just plain makes sense. Like many small towns along the Mississippi have been moved because they flooded yearly. Cover these destroyed houses over and plant grass there.
I do think its stupid to build homes on the side of cliffs in California and homes amongst the creosote Bushes so they burn every 5 years or so.Just as stupid as building homes under sea level.
Insurance companies are trying to find ways now not to pay off claims. High rates and refusal of companies to insure are the result of building in places where the chances are great your home may be destroyed.Why do you think the federal government sells Flood insurance? Because Insurance are too smart to accept the risk. Govt. isnt that bright.Even with giovernment flood insurance the premiums are so hogh most cant pay.
Yes I am probably stupid , but if I were in Houston, a refugee, I sure wouldnt be moving back to New Orleans and living in a home that looks up at the river.
FYI, many private companies offer flood insurance here. It is not the federal government. My aunt is working with Allstate right now, no federalistas evident.
State insurance laws do not allow them to refuse to sell flood insurance if they wish to do business in Louisiana.
To quote General Honore seems appropriate here. You should at least have nominal knowledge of an area you disparage. Shall we discuss many of the problems in Maryland?
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