Krauthammer: Ask Not Towards Whom The Finger Points…
…it points at thee (and me). Charles the Great speaks thusly on Katrina:
In less enlightened times there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews).
A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy. The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.
This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I’ll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period. The problem with the evacuation of New Orleans is not that National Guardsmen in Iraq could not get to New Orleans but that National Guardsmen in Louisiana did not get to New Orleans. As for the Bush tax cuts, administration budget requests for New Orleans flood control during the five Bush years exceed those of the five preceding Clinton years. The notion that the allegedly missing revenue would have been spent wisely by Congress, targeted precisely to the levees of New Orleans, and that the reconstruction would have been completed in time, is a threefold fallacy. The argument ends when you realize that, as The Post noted, “the levees that failed were already completed projects.”
Krauthammer then goes on the enumerate the responsible parties for the New Orleans debacle, from the mayor of New Orleans at #1 to the American people at #6. Highly recommended…
Also of note: CNN becomes the first major news organization that I’m aware of, outside of Fox News, to give big play to the fact that Louisiana officials prevented the Red Cross from going in with relief supplies…
Have I ever mentioned on this blog just how much I love Charles Krauthammer?
But his last paragraph wierded me out a bit.
He only hints at it — but what’s the relevance of a “responsible energy policy”? He can’t possibly be thinking about global warming, can he? (Ok, more likely he’s talking about the rise in oil prices — which look like it’s not going to be major, between the quick release of the S.P.R. and the fact that N.O. refineries are coming back on line (here last item at the bottom — three of the eight big ones are already back in operation, the worst four will take “months”, well within the S.P.R. margin.)
Yeah, I’m curious as to his meaning there, as well…he certainly hinted that he’ll be doing a followup on that, so maybe we’ll see soon…
It could be any number of things. You don’t have to be someone who insists we could drive hemp-powered cars to believe that our energy policy, which right now is pretty much keep doing what we’ve always been doing, isn’t particularly wise in the long run. If you want to keep working with oil, we’ve got to start getting serious about building new refineries and drilling in places like ANWR. But I’ve got no problem at all with encouraging more development of technology to cut down on our use of oil, if only because it would be nice to have a technology that didn’t force us to go looking for energy supplies in unstable parts of the world. It might be pie-in-the-sky technology, but you never know until you try.
And it would help if the party that’s supposedly more environmentally friendly wouldn’t start demanding we dip into the SPR every time gas goes up by a nickel. The Democrats seem really torn between their populist intincts to help Joe Lunchbucket when market forces raise prices and their puritanical instincts to view Joe Lunchbucket as a wasteful user of oil who can only be stopped by raising prices by way of taxes.
Well, he could be talking about our nations shortage of oil refineries due to environmental crusades. Our refineries are running at capacity, and after Katrina did so much damage to an area where many refineries are, that leaves no way to have other refineries pick up the slack. Additionally, they are forced to be local furthering their inefficiency.
With current technology we can make cleaner and more efficient refineries, but the environmentally religious zealots and short sighted feel-gooders block such progress every step of the way.
Chris, not to mention the way the enviros damn near killed nuclear power, a far cleaner and superior energy source…but that’s a subject for another post…