Krauthammer: Not Jews, Not Witches and Not "Global Warming" or "Iraq"

Charles Krauthammer has this to say about the causes of Hurricane Katrina:

In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).

A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I'll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans, but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed that of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenues would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Washington Post notes, ``the levees that failed were already completed projects."

Let's be clear. The author of this calamity was, first and foremost, Nature (or if you prefer, Nature's God). The suffering was augmented, aided and abetted in descending order of culpability by the following:

I now paraphrase the rest of the article, with a recommendation that readers follow my original link to Mr Krauthammer's article, and read his arguments in full:

1. The mayor of New Orleans.

2. The Louisiana governor.

3. The head of FEMA.

4. The president.

5. Congress.

6. The American People.

So there we are. I do not feel particularly qualified to weigh further into the game of apportioning blame for the horriffic loss of life in the South. That article however, written by a normally sensible and reliable commentator seems to get it just about right.