The left-wing hurricane exploiters are now hitching a ride on this story in Editor & Publisher (motto: Editors and publishers should be trying to get the U.S. out of Iraq), which, surprise, accuses Bush of funding the war with money that could have saved New Orleans!
This is just the first shot in what I’m sure will be an inevitable campaign to blame the Bush administration for this tragedy. Thankfully, RedState has launched a pre-emptive debunking of this garbage. It’s a must-read. Here’s the key passage:
In the rational world — which the “reality-based” community increasingly does not inhabit — governance is an exercise in prioritization. Was it rational and defensible to shift funding from any source toward defense- and war-related activities in the aftermath of 9/11? Of course. Did that shift leave the levees unready to handle Katrina’s deadly burden? No. The levees were inherently unready: even at maximum proposed funding, their design was only for a Cat3 storm, not the Cat4/5 that Katrina was. It is true that in 2004, proposals were floated to upgrade to a Cat4/5-capable levee system; it is also true that even in an ideal situation, the studies — not the construction! — necessary to assess what that would entail would not be finished before 2008.
This madness is all of a piece with the “Bush was on vacation when this happened” idiocy. Yes, we could have used his heat vision to seal some of the levees at weak points, and his superhuman strength might have been enough to save some collapsing concrete. But what we really needed was for him to get the rest of the Justice League out there, especially Green Lantern. Or at least to reverse the Earth’s rotation and save us from this disaster.
This last paragraph is pretty naive, actually. Why would Bush use his superpowers to stop a hurricane that he created with his nefarious weather machine in order to distract the media from Cindy Sheehan?