Katrina: Who's To Blame?

A year ago New Orleans and Louisiana politicians failed to mobilize for Hurricane Katrina. That was President Bush’s fault. A year later Mississippi’s recovery from Katrina is way ahead of New Orleans. And that is President Bush’s fault too.

How easy it is to be a liberal. Whatever happens, Big Business, or Republicans, or white racists are to blame. Meanwhile a river of tax monies drops into the lap of liberal politicians every day of the year and they can buy the support of the poor, again and again. With no accountability for results.

There are three reasons for the debacle of Katrina. We all know what they are:

1. If you want to know what is happening, don’t listen to the mainstream media.
   
2. If you want prompt, flexible response in emergency, don’t give the job to government.
   
3. If you want healthy, vibrant cities, spend tax dollars on infrastructure not on social programs.
   

All those rules were violated in New Orleans.

When I first came to the United States in the mid 1960s I was impressed by the heroic level of infrastructure. But then came the Great Society and the diversion of tax revenues into social programs. But it wan’t till the energy price shocks of the 1970s that government really started to skimp on infrastructure. Initially, it was a temporary thing, to get over the budget crises of the era. But the level of spending was never restored.

Today, as Nicole Gelinas observes in City Journal:

Public officials have unfortunately lost interest in such rational infrastructure investment, doubtless because entitlement spending has consumed budgets as well as politicians’ attention. As the American Society of Civil Engineers warned last year, “congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation’s prosperity and our quality of life.” As entitlement spending has gobbled up the federal budget, spending on infrastructure has fallen to about half where it was as a percentage of GDP 40 years ago; state and local infrastructure spending lags as well.

Today, of course, Democrats are baying for investment in infrastructure, as if it wasn’t their complaints about “paving over the nation” wasn’t the cause of the problem in the first place.

But don’t look for them to propose backing out entitlement spending to make basic investment in infrastructure.

Suprise! Non-political Voters Aren't Political

When you are a conservative you want your conservative party to be conservative. You want it to stand for conservative ideas and policies.

There’s only one problem with that. Women. They tend not to vote on ideas, on parties, and on our side vs. their side. They vote for condidates because they like them. It’s enough to send a ideological party supporter crazy.

Just look at the polls on David Cameron, the young, new, non-ideological leader of the British Conservative Party. William Rees-Mogg takes a look at the numbers. Right now, a

YouGov poll published in The Daily Telegraph on Friday gave the Conservatives 38 per cent, Labour 31 and the Lib Dems 18.

But the party identification right now is 17 percent Conservative, 24 percent Labour. That means that the Conservatives right now are attracting the support of a ton of independents, but Labour is only attracting the support of a few beyond its base.

[Take this] opinion poll, taken by ICM and published in The Sunday Times [Sunday.] This shows that men would prefer Gordon Brown to David Cameron as prime minister by 42 to 36 per cent, but women would prefer Mr Cameron to Mr Brown by 40 to 34. This is in line with YouGov which shows a 2 per cent swing to the Conservatives since the last election among men, but a 6 per cent swing among women.

The numbers show that the Conservatives are leading among women and independents, both groups that do not vote the issues so much as their feelings about the candidates.

Now you can see why David Cameron has been concentrating on presenting himself to the voters as an appealing personality. The voters who are up for grabs are precisely the voters who are swayed by personality.

Mr Cameron is the non-party leader of his party: he identifies best with non-party voters, who are, paradoxically, the largest party.

Now it all makes sense. But if you believe in the power of ideas it is enough to make you crazy.

The Mood of the Voter in November

Somehow I think that the November elections this year are going to tell us something. And for a curious reason.

After a decade in which Democrats have kept their hearts hidden from the voters their base has decided that they just can’t take it any more. take a look at the portents

• There is the crazed partisan ruling on terrorist surveillance from federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that reads like its author lives in a hard left-wing bubble.
  
• There is the Stop the War candidacy of Democrat Ned Lamont.
  
• There is the union-fueled War on Wal-Mart.
  
• There is the rage of the “netroots.”
  
• There is the clenched-teeth reporting from the mainstream media.
  

After 12 years of Republican Congress and six years of President Bush they just can’t take it any more.

The question is: Does the American people agree with them? What do the folks in their monster houses think? What do the people in their mega SUVs think? Do workers think that their employers are ripping them off? Are people enraged about health insurance? Or do they think that they are rubbing along OK?

We really don’t know. Not yet.

But the election in November is going to give us a pretty good idea.

The Wages of Multiculturalism, Again

A big problem in the war on terror, Michael Barone opines, is that we are not just fighting Islam. We are also at war with the usual suspects: the western left.

[I]n terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society... But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

Then Barone writes, like a deconstructionist pro, about the notion of privileged ideas and narratives. There are people in our society who have made it their business to emphasize the bad parts of our history and ignore the good parts.

You might say that while they rail against the privileged dead white male narrative they have constructed their own privileged narrative, one that you dissent against at your peril.

But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The trouble is that necessary process of rooting out this covert enemy and refounding the American narrative of hope and optimism is going to be a long and divisive war.

And it hasn’t even got started yet.

The Wages of Multiculturalism

A benefit of Islamic terror, Shelby Steele indicates, is that it will force the west to demolish the left-wing game of oppression.

For over a century the left has used the weapon of “oppression” to mute the power of the middle class. Today that means crying “Oppression!” to mute the power of Israel and the United States.

It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power... Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression.

The extremism we are talking about is the monstrosity of anti-semitism and anti-Christianism as practiced by the Islamic fascists. And it feeds on the left-inspired pathology of white guilt.

But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility--if still quite remote--for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.

For the facts are damning. The west has given the Middle East a huge gift: the right to pump oil out of the ground using western organization and western technology and keep the proceeds. And the Middle East has poured that gift out onto the sand and spat on it.

In Britain the sands are running out on the left’s ugly little game of multiculturalism, as The Daily Telegraph is glad to observe.

In 1984, Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, was forced to retire after writing that multiculturalism was doing a disservice to children from immigrant backgrounds... Last week, in slightly more mangled language, Ruth Kelly, the communities and local government minister, said much the same thing.

That is easy to write, but in the 22 years between Honeyford’s forced retirement and Ruth Kelly’s retreat the left has terrorized the guardians of traditional white Anglo-Saxon culture, as it played out its nasty game of oppression and multiculturalism. And for what? To say, after all, that it was all a mistake.

The problem is that it is more than a mistake. It is going to cost lives, certainly tens of thousands of lives. And maybe it will cost millions of lives before all is done.

All because the left wanted to mute the power of the United States.

Robbed of Her Adolescence

The startling escape from captivity of Austrian Natascha Kampusch is the very stuff of the human condition.

After years confined in a cell she suddenly sees and grabs a chance to escape from her cruel jailer.

It’s a glorious tale of ascent from dire oppression to freedom.

But it is a tale with a twist. When Wolfgang Priklopil captured her and bundled her into a white van in 1998, Natascha Kampusch was only 10 years old.

As Kate Connolly tells the story, Natascha

was ordered to climb down some narrow concrete steps, to slip through a square hatch into a tiny outer room, and then to walk through to another door. Behind it was the dank and windowless soundproof cell that would be her home for the best part of the next decade.

Now she is 18 and weighs less than she did 8 years ago.

No doubt there have always been monsters who have confined little girls like this. But somehow, in the impersonal and anonymous cities of today, it seems too easy. That is what “privacy” really means. You can get up to mischief without anyone knowing, or having the right to know, what you are up to.

Yet if freedom has any meaning it means precisely the right to do things without asking permission.

Unfortunately, as Vladimir Nabokov prophetically taught us half a century ago in Lolita, it also means men with a taste for “nymphets” getting the opportunity to indulge their taste.

By all accounts, Priklopil kept his captive thin and nymphet-like until the end.

But now Natascha has escaped into freedom. Now she must learn to live with the challenges and the temptations of freedom.

The psychologists say she will need long-term therapy. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

She will still have to learn to live in freedom, poised like every other 18 year-old on the cusp of adulthood. But she must do it without the benefit of a life lived, for the last critical eight years, in the world.

Straight Talk or Forked Tongue

Look. I didn’t like John McCain in 2000. I didn’t like him running against the GOP base to the delight of the left-liberal media.

I didn’t like him taking pot-shots at President Bush in the first term, and not being much help on the tax cuts.

I didn’t like the rabbit punch at the First Amendment in the McCain-Feingold incumbent protection act.

And, if you are interested, I didn’t like the reports that he had a habit of breaking airplanes when he was in the U.S. Navy. In the RAF back in Britland they have a rule that when you wreck your third aeroplane then you are grounded. Forever.

I just don’t like people who are rough on equipment. I figure that they are likely to be careless and rough on other things in their lives.

So I didn’t like Senator John McCain’s “day at the beach” remarks. In his major speeches President Bush has been perfectly clear that the War on Terror is going to be long and painful.

OK. So I enjoyed David Limbaugh’s critique of Senator McCain. He thinks that the “day at the beach” remarks make McCain’s presidential hopes even more of a long shot than before.

The only chance he had hinged on his steadfast support for the war effort and his refusal to side with partisan Democrats who have born false witness against President Bush in saying he lied about Iraq. With his latest shameless utterance, McCain has virtually sabotaged his already dim chances for the Republican nomination — and rightly so.

So let McCain enjoy the adulation of the mainstream media. It’s about the only adulation he is likely to get—and rightly so.