September 14, 2005, 8:33 a.m.
All the Uglier
What Katrina whipped up.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the September 26, 2005, issue of National Review.

For years, many of us have noted and analyzed the phenomenon of Bush hatred — and all the unreason, hysteria, and meanness packed into it. But Hurricane Katrina seems to have taken the phenomenon to a new level. A natural disaster has been made all the uglier by the politics surrounding it.

The first response of many to the destruction of New Orleans and other areas was to revile George Bush — and conservatism and Republicans and much else. Obviously, there are legitimate criticisms of the government, at all levels, to be made. In fact, a (conservative) friend of mine cracked, “We said we’d make Iraq look like the United States, and so we have.” But legitimate criticism has often been lost in spiteful lunacy. Katrina was an occasion to rehearse all of one’s fears and opinions and obsessions about the War on Terror, global warming, capitalism, the federal budget, race. Katrina was an invitation to bust a political gut.

Exhibit A in the awfulness of Katrina reaction was the piece by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for The Huffington Post. The title over the piece was Biblical: “For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind.” RFK Jr., of course, is not only the bearer of an illustrious name; he is a leader of the environmentalist movement in America.

“As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast,” Kennedy wrote, “it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.” Kennedy is concerned here about a memo that Barbour, as a lobbyist, wrote in 2001. It urged the administration to follow an anti-Kyoto course.

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