Posted on 09/02/2009 3:16:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
Four years have elapsed since one of the most amazing cases of Republican-bashing media bias in the television era began. The media elites laugh when preachers say immorality causes God to send hurricanes, but they suggested with straight faces that Hurricane Katrina was a death sentence President Bush and his cronies brought to the less fortunate.
In the early spin, race-baiting rapper Kanye West and "objective" anchors like Brian Williams were in rhetorical sync: George Bush didn't care about black people. On "The Daily Show," Williams said "everyone" knew Bush would have done better if white people were endangered: "Everyone watching the coverage all week, that kind of reached its peak last weekend, kept saying the same refrain: 'How is this happening in the United States?' And the other refrain was, 'Had this been Nantucket, had this been Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, how many choppers would have --'"
Williams couldn't finish. The liberal audience drowned him in applause.
A year later, Williams was pressing Bush about being a bigot, harboring a "social or race or class aspect" in the federal response, then inviting in radical professor Michael Eric Dyson to denounce the Bush family as "clueless patricians."
It didn't matter how many tens of thousands were saved by federal, state and local first responders in helicopters and boats. The never-ending political commercial called the "news" was in heavy rotation. Today, it's not considered the least bit impolite or inaccurate for hard-left blogs like the Daily Kos to proclaim New Orleans the scene of a mass murder: "We let the Republicans kill a major U.S. city. We let them laugh about it and walk away."
But here's the amazing part: Four years after the hurricane, the networks are still trashing the federal government for failing people who still live in federal trailers. None of them can manage to wonder when these "victims" will be responsible in any way for their own housing and circumstances. Or ponder for even a second the possibility that it's now taxpayers who are the victims.
On the Aug. 31 "CBS Evening News," investigative reporter Armen Keteyian was hot on this hackneyed story, and still projecting all the outrage onto the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), even though there was no mention of the healing, messianic force of President Obama.
"Two years after FEMA began moving people out of the trailers, contaminated with the toxic chemical formaldehyde," he proclaimed dramatically, "case workers tell CBS News the thousands left in the trailers aren't trying to beat the system; they are victims of a system that's proved incapable of helping them get out."
So the system that couldn't put them in housing fast enough is now to blame for not letting them out?
Keteyian claimed to be an investigator, but he never spent any air time investigating precisely how many billions the taxpayers in Montana and Delaware and South Dakota have sent to the Gulf for Katrina aid, and he failed to devote one second to the concept that at some point, Katrina "victims" have proven themselves "incapable" or incompetent in fixing their own situation. The "news judgment" of the major networks implies there is no such thing as individual responsibility.
One of Keteyian's victims, Kendall Deschamp, suggested all he needs is a little more taxpayer money. "A disabled state highway worker, Deschamp collects just $1,368 a month in benefits -- not enough, he says, to afford the sheetrock and new hot water heater he needs for the permit allowing him to move back into his four-bedroom home, which stands just a few tantalizing feet away."
A little Googling would show Keteyian that the name Kendall Deschamp shows up on a list of Mississippi recipients of taxpayer money in 2003 -- $25,500 -- two years before Katrina hit. The website doesn't explain the reason for this subsidy. But wouldn't it be fascinating to take one individual like Deschamp and ask how much this person has cost the taxpayer over the last four years? The networks wouldn't dream of doing that.
Keteyian can only sing from the liberal songbook, that the federal government must provide a never-ending flow of support. "Today, these travel trailers stand as a symbol of a recovery gone wrong. A hurricane of cover-up, chaos and incompetence. A system that remains, in the words of one FEMA worker on the ground here in Mississippi, one big disgusting mess."
The networks will also never wonder if this doesn't punch a huge hole in their liberalism. If the federal government is a "hurricane of cover-up, chaos, and incompetence," why should we hand over health care to them? Are the networks on this story really exposing what's wrong? Or enabling it?
The only thing that Katrina proved was that some cities are simply unable to govern themselves.
The only thing that Katrina proved was that some cities people are simply unable to govern themselves wipe their own ass!.
The networks will also never wonder if this doesn’t punch a huge hole in their liberalism. If the federal government is a “hurricane of cover-up, chaos, and incompetence,” why should we hand over health care to them?
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Another excellent example to use when discussing the impossibility of successful Obamacare.
And an ex-Fema advisor,friend of Bill Clinton, to said governor who advised her to delay calling in Federal troops.
That “little” detail is totally ignored by state-supporting media.
Nagin’s chocolates made Katrina the most overrated disaster in history, and it seems to never end.
Bozell is right. Good and decent people in North Dakota and Wyoming are pulling a wagon filled with the “motivationally challenged”.
None of them can even manage to wonder why those "victims" had never been responsible in any way for their own housing and circumstances before Katrina either. Sloth and Bias just equals more sloth and bias. Different day, same tune.
When the Red River flooded last March the folks from FEMA were putting huge pressure on the authorities to evacuate Fargo, ND. The mayor of Fargo responded that the people could not be evacuated because they were needed to fight the flood; filling sandbags, making dikes etc. Those volunteers, particularly the thousands of college and high school students made the difference and saved the city. Nobody sat on the curb and waited for the government to come in and save the day. The most effective government in this emergency was the one closest to the disaster, the city. They had a plan in place, implemented the plan and saved Fargo with the help of thousands of volunteers and the North Dakota National Guard. I hope FEMA took good notes.
The left controls the media, and to a large degree, the thoughts of millions of mind-numbed Americans.
I made a drive from Houston to Panama City in Novemver ‘05 just a couple of months after Katrina. Though Miss, there were big tent cities right off the interstate. Right out in the open and very visible. No media coverage at all except local. Coastal Mississippi got the brunt of Katrina.
All the news coverage was on the lower ninth ward.
New Orleans east is about 100 times the size of the lower ninth and got just as hammered. No media there.
Difference, NO East and coastal Mississippi is populated with hard working taxpayers. The upper coast of Texas got hit by a much bigger storm last year and we are mostly cleaned up. There is still storm damage in New Orleans after 4 years.
On August 17th and 18th in 2007 my area of southeast Minnesota received 24 inches of rain in 24 hours. There were horrible flash floods, mudslides and water damage. Entire communities were under water, people lost their homes, and roads, bridges and dams were washed out. A number of people lost their lives.
Early on the morning of Sunday, August 19th you could hear chain saws, tractors and end loaders. The volunteer firemen and neighbors went door to door to check on people. Within hours the mudslides had been pushed off the roads by both the county workers and local citizens. Local volunteers set up several shelters in city buildings and schools to house the displaced. By the time the governor came down to inspect the worst of the ordeal was over.
Real Americans are cooperative, tough, resilient and resourceful. They don't wait for help from the state or from FEMA. And they surely don't sit on their dead kiesters complaining.
Elite liberals look on diaster areas like New Orleans (and Detroit, Newark, etc.) and wonder at the “failure” of America to help these people. What they are actually looking at is the failure of government “help” and most of all the failure of liberal policies that ensured those “victims” would not have the resources to get themselves out of their own messes. Let’s see: two thirds of New Orlean’s population made it out before the hurrican hit. Why is it that the other third couldn’t? We know the answer to that.
I was there in January of 2006, with a friend who lived in New Orleans, and he was shccked silly by the sight of the devastation to Mississippi — living only an hour away, he had had no idea.
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