Fisking Kristine vanden Heuvel

Off all the irritating left-wing, whack-job that populate the blogosphere, that one that annoys me the most is Kristine vanden Heuvel. She's an arrogant, condescending, sanctimonious hand-wringing lefty who blames America (read "pale penis people") for all of life's ills. Her latest screed is a series of paragraphs exonerating everybody except the Bush administration. Don't get me wrong, the head of FEMA, Michael Brown, seems to have come off as clueless. Fine. But the military once ordered in President Bush (who really doesn't have that authority to deploy troops inside without being invite in by a governor) have saved the day. Here's a paragraph by paragraph rebuttal. Ms. vanden Heuvel needs this.

Blame the Victims: Both FEMA's Michael Brown and Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff, the Mutt and Jeff of this calamity, have blamed careless, destitute New Orleaners for not evacuating. "Those who got out are fine," Chertoff told NBC's Tim Russert. FEMA sought to excuse its delays in entering the city by blaming the looters.

Me: Yeah, looters are a huge issue, but they didn't descend out of the sky like rain from Katrina. They were allowed to run amok by a policy of not stopping looters instituted by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. No looters = no delays. You can't send search and rescue teams into a battle zone.

Blame the Locals: In a stroke of political luck, both the New Orleans mayor and Louisiana's Governor are Democrats. As the New York Times reported, Karl Rove's PR strategy is to shift the blame to the state and city officials. All Sunday, White House officials and Fox News played this card. Expect more of this line of attack.

Me: These folks deserve all the grief they get. See every other post on this blog. These people are so incompetent it's nearly criminal.

Blame the City: In perhaps the most bizarre excuse, Chertoff pointed the finger the city of New Orleans itself, saying, "It is a soup bowl. People have talked for years about whether it makes sense to have a city like that."

Me:Yeah, people have been living there for hundreds of years knowing they we surround by lots'o'water. This from Steve Graham:
Locals chose not to pay for an adequate flood control system. It was well within their means, and they had almost three hundred years to get it done. When they complain about the "Bush-Dominated" Congress's evil refusal to foot the whole bill, and they tell us how much more money was needed, they themselves quote a figure of about sixty million dollars. Don't tell me an entire state couldn't come up with sixty million dollars. As a reader of mine pointed out, they somehow came up with a hundred and thirty-eight million dollars to pay for a football stadium.

Moral: If you don't address obvious threat yourself, it your fault later on. Locals should know there local problems and fix them accordingly.

Blame the Media: Last week, Brown blamed media coverage for the perception that New Orleans had descended into lawlessness. "I actually think security is darn good.... It seems to me that every time a bad person wants to cause a problem, there's somebody with a camera to stick in their face."

Me: A lot of the stories of lawlessness have been proven to be untrue. But still a lot of them were true. I''ll conceed that FEMA Chief Brown is a clueless nincompoop; but he didn't create the looters.

Look on the Bright Side: As Americans continued to drown, Chertoff came up with this gem about the rescue efforts: "There were some things that actually worked very well. There were some things that didn't."

Me: Life isn't a Hollywood film where everything works out in the end. Some things do the way they're supposed to and others don't. No plan is perfect in the face of a fluid situation. That stated, what FEMA tried and worked is far more than the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana attempted. Their passivity in the face of dire calamity is frightening. People are dead because they did nothing but scream for the Feds to ride to the rescue.

Ignoramus Defense: When FEMA's Brown, who was fired from his last job overseeing Arabian horse shows, said he was as "surprised as everybody else" to discover there were desperate people in the New Orleans convention center, CNN Soledad O'Brien asked, "How is it possible that we're getting better intel than you're getting?" But it was left up to our physically fit President for the whopper of the week: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

It is likely this last defense will be scrapped for obvious reasons. If only we could do the same to this Administration for painfully obvious reasons.

Me: First an ad-hominen attack on the head of FEMA, then, why didn't he know that there were desparate people, with no food, water or security at the civic center? I guess he thought that Mayor Nagin and Gov. Blanco would have thought about that in advance and had some food and water in place, brought to these faciliaties in the week before the disaster. That somehow, both FEMA head Brown and President Bush are to blame for the disaster simplyt because they didn't know of the extent of the Mayor and the Governor's incompetence. I would have suspected either. I thought both would be better prepared and more professional.

Guess not.