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 (a prominent website). 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.
Later in his piece, Kennedy wrote, “Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and — now — Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”
The author concluded, “In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.”
Needless to say, RFK Jr. was wrong about the sparing of New Orleans. He was forced to write an update: “Alas, the reprieve for New Orleans was only temporary. But Haley Barbour still has much to answer for.” In Kennedy’s scribblings, much of the Left’s ugliness about Katrina and the Republicans is encapsulated.
To an amazing extent, global warming has become all-explaining. It is the cause of our natural ills, in all their diversity. It is an idée fixe, a universal bogey. Just as the Jew is both a communist and a capitalist, and the American both a materialist and a puritan, global warming is responsible for heat and cold, drought and flood — anything nature might be throwing at us at the moment. When Al Gore gives a speech on global warming, he is apt to say, “We’ve been having some weird weather lately, haven’t we?” The word weird covers a multitude of conditions.
After Katrina, Sidney Blumenthal, President Clinton’s former aide, pointed his finger: “At the G8 meeting in Gleneagles [Scotland] this year, Bush stymied any common action on global warming.” The German environmental minister, Jürgen Trittin, wrote, “Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced and it has to happen worldwide. Until now, the U.S. has kept its eyes shut to this emergency.” In particular, “the American president is closing his eyes . . .” The Boston Globe had an op-ed piece by Ross Gelbspan, saying, “The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.”
But blogger Arthur Chrenkoff gave “the prize for originality” to Russell Shaw, who, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., writes for The Huffington Post. Mused Shaw, “Would New Orleans and the nearby Gulf Coast be suffering so terribly today if President Carter beat back Reagan in 1980? . . . I am wondering if those voters in Louisiana and Mississippi who helped polluter-allied Reagan win in 1980 would have found themselves fated differently under a second Carter term.”
Forgetting the questionability (to say the least) of attributing Hurricane Katrina to global warming or pollution: Shaw’s musings dance up to, “They had it coming.” So do RFK Jr.’s. Throughout the Muslim world, they were saying that Katrina was a weapon of God, that America had, so to speak, reaped the whirlwind. Are these foreign nuts and haters so different from our respected commentators at home?
When things go wrong, people want a culprit, a demon, and the American president often serves that purpose. There was never a more humane man than our 31st president, yet camps for the destitute were called “Hoovervilles” — a gallingly nasty jab. Today, some people are referring to flooded New Orleans as “Lake George.” Bush was repeatedly portrayed as oblivious to the disaster, entranced by his ranch. Howell Raines, the former executive editor of the New York Times, wrote that Bush was providing a lesson in “how to vacation through an apocalypse.” Around the world went a picture of Bush playing a guitar — you see, this was his Nero, Rome-burning moment. But the president had been handed a guitar by a country singer after a speech marking the 60th anniversary of V-J Day. Bush was not merely fiddling around.
Contradictions abounded: For years, the National Guard had been mocked as a refuge for weenies — “chickenhawks” — such as Dan Quayle and George W. Bush. Now the National Guard was heroic, but Bush had made these men unavailable by sending them to an “unnecessary” and “immoral” war in the Middle East. Bush had been a ruinous big spender — but the Democratic National Committee, through its blog, quickly came up with a different line: “Bush is already focusing on avoiding any kind of accountability for this tragedy. But his budget cuts are responsible for what we’re seeing.” Think of the weight of the words are responsible for what we’re seeing.
Everyone said that money should be taken from X program or endeavor (whatever the individual disfavored) and given to hurricane relief. It reminded me of one of my favorite political cartoons ever: Speaker O’Neill has his arm around President Reagan, and is saying, “Do you know how many hot school lunches your $100 million in aid to the Contras would buy?” (Hot school lunches were a hot trope in the 1980s.) “I do, Tip,” answers Reagan: “Half as many as your $200 million in aid to Northern Ireland.”
And all of us conservatives were again lectured on the utility and importance of government: They did this to us after 9/11, too. “Ha, ha,” went the cry. “See, you conservatives, how needed government is?” Shortly after Katrina, The Nation’s David Corn wrote, “Barbour led the GOP when it was waging war on Big Government. Now he’s all for it.”
Conservatives responded just as they did after 9/11: Government — the federal government — has its responsibilities, and its non-responsibilities. We are against midnight basketball, free prescription drugs for the wealthy, maybe Amtrak. We are not against combatting terror and helping masses of Americans after the worst hurricane we have ever known.
“Big Oil” came in for it too — and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee used exactly those cartoonish words: “It’s time for the president to step up and put the needs of the American people ahead of profits for his pals in Big Oil.” Howard Dean will be Howard Dean. More vitriolic was a blogger who enjoyed 15 minutes of fame, or infamy. Said Joseph Cannon, “The National Guard was off in Iraq stealing oil — and everything else in that nation — all to benefit Halliburton and the oil companies.” He added, “A large part of me still believes that many of these W-worshipping numbskulls deserve to suffer and to die. They brought it on themselves. Let them look to Jayzuss [Jesus] for aid: It’s time they stopped leeching off the more productive blue staters.”
I stress the point of gratuitous cruelty. And it did not come merely from red-hot bloggers. Have another taste of Howell Raines: “The churchgoing cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the House of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die in foreign deserts.” In addition, there were the usual charges of racism, made by the usual chargers. And here is Air America’s Randi Rhodes, with a typical comment about the president: “I think somewhere deep down inside him he takes a lot of joy about losing people, if he thinks they vote Democrat or if he thinks they’re poor or if he thinks they’re in a blue state . . .”
With a certain crowd, George Bush will never be able to win. As was widely pointed out, he was criticized last summer for responding “too quickly” to Hurricane Charley, which was in Florida: a key electoral state, don’t you know, and this was an election year. And now he is said to have been slow on Katrina. He is either in the way or harmfully missing — depending on your psychic and polemical needs.
We conservatives sometimes seem insincere when we say we regret the Michael Moore-ization of the Democratic party (to use a shorthand). Sometimes we are insincere. But mostly we mean it, I think. Another conservative friend of mine — not the previously cited quipper — observed that the Left, once again, was overplaying its hand, with fierce Bush hatred. Probably true. But this performance was grotesque and disheartening all the same.
– This piece appears in the September 26, 2005, issue of National Review.