Librulism ‘R Us
In case you are tired of hearing me rail on about racism and other topics that make people uncomfortable, check out this extremely well-reasoned argument by Scott Lemiuex of Lawyers, Guns and Money on the topic of abortion.
I plan to take up the subjects of animal rights and freeing Mumia, so be warned…
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Criminals Much?
So, we have a federal probe implicating the president’s number one political advisor and the vice president’s chief of staff in the violation of laws protecting CIA agents and possibly lying to federal investigators.
We have a multi-pronged investigation into a lobbyist who happens to be a very close associate of Tom DeLay,Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and the entire Republican leadership going back to their youth as members of the College republicans. This lobbyist is now implicated in a mafia murder plot and has been arrested on charges affiliated with that crime.
A member of the Bush administration who is a good friend and associate of all of the above was arrested this week for lying to the Feds about his good friend the lobbyist.
The majority leader of the Senate is now officially under investigation by the SEC and federal prosecutors for insider trading involving potentially many millions of dollars.
The majority leader of the House was just indicted by a Texas Grand jury for violating laws prohibiting the use of corporate money in campaigns.
I am so relieved that the Republicans restored honor and integrity to Washington. There hasn’t been even one blow job in that town since they took power.
Update: Oh and that reminds me — David Drier is now the majority leader of the House of Representatives.
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Your Lyin’ Eyes
It’s depressing that you have to get this elementary with the American press, but you do. There is something called cause and effect. Any of you out there who don’t know what that means can use your friend, Mr Google, to find out what it is.
New Orleans is a largely black city. Most of those who did not evacuate were poor African Americans. In the day after Katrina, pictures of victims standing on rooftops emerged. Heroic rescues were filmed. In short order we saw pictures of looting — which immediately sent the wingnuts into a frenzy. This immediately led to cries for martial law — stories of shooting, killing and rape followed. (Interestingly, this story in which photojournalists on the scene were interviewed early on indicates that while looting and theft were common, the violence they observed was mostly perpetrated by nervous police.)
We do not know to what extent these stories inhibited the relief effort, but there is evidence that they did. A real post mortem should be able to sort that out.
Because of the paranoid fear of violence and many other things such as the necessary National Guard equipment being deployed to Iraq and a federal agency charged with stepping in where local and state governments are overwhelmed being incompetent in virtually every way possible — the conditions in New Orleans deteriorated rapidly as basic necessities and evacuations were delayed.
Let’s make it simple for everyone. The reports of violence were overblown. The reports of misery, dehydration, delayed medical care, no food and wretched conditions were not. And it is highly likely that it was the first that led, at least in part, to the second.
Yet, the New York Times fails to make that distinction and pretends that the the desperation was overblown.
During the first few days, as local officials grappled with the overwhelming disaster, Mr. Nagin and Mr. Compass were outspoken about how desperate the situation in their city was, though some of those statements are now coming under scrutiny, with some critics saying they exaggerated the situation.
An editorial in The Times Picayune today faulted the two New Orleans officials for their leadership during those first few days, and for their public statements about the direness of the situation.
“It’s understandable that in the tense and fractured days after Katrina, frightened people reported rumor as fact, and soldiers, police and even elected officials believed what they heard and passed it on.” the editorial said. “In the hell that descended after Katrina, almost anything, no matter how horrific, seemed possible.
“But now that we know better, it’s essential that people like Mayor Nagin and Superintendent Compass set the record straight, just as forcefully. That might mean saying, ‘I spoke too soon” or even, ‘I exaggerated,’ ” the editorial said.
The newspaper said that during an interview by Oprah Winfrey, Mr. Compass said “that babies were being raped.”
“Thank God it didn’t happen,” the editorial said.
The Times-Picayune editorial was quite specific. The New York Times was not.
And that, predictably, plays into this quixotic quest by right-wing bloggers to prove that the entire disaster was overblown, not just the violence. That is not going to fly.
Here’s a little reminder:
I urge everyone to click on the BagNews picture in the left column or click here and take a look at the amazing images shot by Alan Chin in New Orleans. He’s the one who shot the iconic picture of the elderly African American woman wrapped in the American flag. There can be no doubt of what happened in the after math of Katrina — horrible human suffering caused by a massive government failure.
The only question is why.
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Nothing To See Here
I’m sure most of you have already read Rick Perlstein’s op-ed that never ran over on Eschaton this morning. If you haven’t, go read it.
For some reason, no editorial board wanted to hear from a historian who was pointing out that wild rumors about racial violence are a regular feature of urban disturbances in America and should be treated skeptically by the press until real evidence emerges.
I imagine they thought that Perlstein was playing the race card — like all us liberals do at the drop of a hat. Nobody wants to hear it.
Meanwhile, here’s some more fallout — and another little illustration of why the Section 8 idea is meeting resistence:
GREENSBURG, La., Sept. 27 – The federal government, straining to find temporary housing for thousands of evacuees from New Orleans, has generally encountered hospitality in cities and towns in the gulf area. But the reception has been very different in the small parish of St. Helena.
Here, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, white residents have spoken up at public meetings to oppose vehemently the construction of temporary housing for the evacuees, most of whom are black. The tension could complicate tentative plans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy land in the parish for trailer lots.
“The only thing we see about these people on the news is what happened in the Superdome,” said Philip Devall, 42, a white resident of Greensburg, at a recent meeting of the parish government. “They’re rapists and thugs and murderers. I’m telling you, half of them have criminal records. I’ve worked all my life to have what I have. I can’t lose it, and I can’t stand guard 24 hours a day.”
About 2,000 evacuees have been staying with friends and family in the parish since Hurricane Katrina, and police officials here say that crime related to the newcomers has been virtually nonexistent. But many residents say that fear is the driving force behind their opposition.
“I want to know how many sex offenders they’re going to move in next to me,” said Marci Kent, 36, also a white resident of Greensburg, at the meeting. “And I got daughters, too.”
When one white man expressed concern at the meeting over possibly losing his valuables to lawless evacuees, a black woman turned around and angrily pointed a finger at him. “We work hard for what we got, too,” she said. “But these people need a place to stay.”
Yeah, that race card is bogus, all right.
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Rumors and Expectations
Pre$$titutes reports that righty bloggers are going all Claude Rains on us because they “just realized” that the media reported anarchy and violence in New Orleans that was unsubstantiated. Drudge is especially shocked that anyone would spread scurrilous rumors.
They are holding the media responsible for the Katrina aftermath and they are not entirely wrong. Of course the media should have been skeptical of these crazy rumors and should have wondered why they weren’t seeing any evidence of the alleged mayhem as they waded through the city. All I ever saw was a few desultory looters hauling around some boxes of sneakers.
The media certainly need to ask themselves some probing questions about why they were so gullible. It didn’t pass the smell test from the get as far as I was concerned. (But then as TBOGG pithily reminds us, it isn’t exactly the first time the media have bought into rumor and speculation hook line and sinker, now is it?)
But blaming the media is missing the point. They, like many others, chose to believe something for which there was no evidence. The press saw and reported the wretched spectacle of the evacuees living in horrible conditions, waiting and begging for help, but by that time everything was seen within the prism of the earlier (and ongoing) reports of violence. They need to do some soul searching about that.
Even those who lived it, for many reasons, saw the situation as anarchic and dangerous for their own reasons.
Bud Hopes, of Brisbane, was praised for saving dozens of tourists as the supposed safe haven of the city’s Superdome became a hellhole.
“I would have to say that Bud is solely responsible for our evacuation,” Vanessa Cullington, 22, of Sydney, told the Sunday Herald Sun by mobile phone from a bus carrying 10 Australians to safety in Dallas, Texas.
“I dread to think what would have happened if we hadn’t got out. It’s so great to be free.”
News of the group’s escape came as reports said as many as 10,000 people might have been killed by the hurricane and its aftermath, and President George Bush ordered more troops and an increased aid effort for the stricken Gulf of Mexico states.
As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste. Gangs stalked the tourists and women were threatened with rape.
“Bud took control. He was calm and kept it together the whole time,” Ms Cullington said.
Mr Hopes, 32, said: “That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad.
“Everyone brought their drugs, they brought guns, they brought knives. Soldiers were shot.
“It was like a refugee camp within a prison.
“It was full on. It was the worst thing I have seen in my life. I have never been so frightened.”
Realising that foreigners were a target, Mr Hopes and the other Aussies gathered tourists from Europe, South America and elsewhere into one part of the building.
“There were 65 of us, so we were able to look after each other — especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened.” Mr Hopes said.
He said they had organised escorts for the women when they had gone for food or to the toilet, and rosters to keep guard while others slept.
“We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning.”
John McNeil, 20, of Brisbane, said the worst point had come after two days when soldiers had told them the power in the dome was failing and there was only 10 minutes worth of gas left.
“I looked at Bud and said, ‘That will be the end of us’,” Mr McNeil said.
“The gangs . . . knew where we were. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We prayed for a miracle and the lights stayed on.”
[…]
Mrs McNeil broke down when she saw images of her son leaving New Orleans.
“There have been times during this past week when we didn’t know if we would see him again,” she said.
Mr McNeil said he could see a change in his son.
“They’ve been traumatised,” he said. “I think they’ve witnessed several atrocities.”.
They worked themselves into a frenzy, just as a whole lot of other people did.(98% were bad!!!) They may have been threatened. I have no way of knowing. But it was a long way from “atrocities.” The reports of others — many of whom were white — at the Superdome don’t bear out their story. These were people who were convinced that because they were the minority, they were going to be killed. But there are many other whites who didn’t see themselves threatened this way at all. Perceptions were everything. Beliefs and prejudices about race and class were everything.
It was even as if some people expected it to happen, somewhere in their subconscious, even before the rumors started. Check out this post at 10:05 am on Monday, August 29th, when people still thought “a bullet had been dodged” in New Orleans, long before anyone realized that the cavalry was waiting for massive reinforcements before it would dare to enter the barbarous city:
ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]
I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It’s never too soon to be prepared.
Posted at 10:05 AM
You can’t blame the MSM for that. They hadn’t even begun to report the mayhem that shortly caused Peggy Noonan (and her latest manly hero, Haley Barbour) to call for the looters (a useful euphemism) to be shot on sight.
At 10:45 on the morning after the hurricane, Jonah has already called forth the “Lord of the Flies” image that would be emblematic of New Orleans the next few days. (This google search shows just how many references there were.) Jonah made a few more peurile remarks about how the loss was worse for middle class families and the like before he finally settled down and realized that the disaster was of epic prooprtions. But he predicted the “anarchy” even before the rumors that turned out to be false began. It existed in his mind. I think it existed in a lot of people’s minds.
(If you’d like some real fun, go to the Corner link and read Rich Lowry’s comments as he breathlessly clips items and snippets of news reports about violence and mayhem.)
I’m not letting the media off the hook. They too took these ridiculous stories on faith and there were serious consequences to them being circulated. But the question that must be asked isn’t why the media reported them — the question is why so many people, including the media, were so willing to believe them in the absence of any real evidence.
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Modern GOP Noblesse Oblige
The internal polls must be worse that we thought. They are really grasping at straws:
Facing criticism that he appeared disengaged from the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina, President Bush has been looking for opportunities to show his concern. But the White House will take the effort a step further Tuesday, venturing into untested waters by putting the nation’s first lady on reality television.
Laura Bush will travel to storm-damaged Biloxi, Miss., to film a spot on the feel-good, wish-granting hit “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” Mrs. Bush sought to be on the program because she shares the “same principles” that the producers hold, her press secretary said.
In its standard format, the popular ABC series finds hard-pressed but deserving families, sends them away for short vacations and then, in a whirlwind of carpentry and appliance-shopping, gives them new homes. This time, though, the show will broadcast from an underserved shelter near Biloxi, where a convoy of trucks stocked with everything from mattresses to pants will arrive, courtesy of Sears, one of the show’s sponsors.
It’s not clear exactly what Mrs. Bush will do, but Tom Forman, executive producer and creator, said he is hoping that she’ll just pitch in and help unload.
Next week, the cabinet will appear on the special New Orleans version of Survivor, where the Bush team will loll around the pool in Crawford deciding what to have for dinner while the all black 9th ward team lives on bugs and swims through snake infested flood waters to safety. The winners will have their capital gains taxes cut to zero.
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Twisted Psyches
Via John at Americablog, I found this article about the warporn site from the Online Journalism Review that is quite interesting.
Near the end the author briefly addresses what I think is the most disturbing aspect of this disheartening story — the combination of sexual pornography and real violent images.
While it was difficult for me to ascertain the motivation for people who were posting gory photos to NTFU, I did talk to Steven Most, a psychology postdoctoral fellow at Yale University who has studied the effects of violent and sexual images. He helped explain what these horribly violent images had in common with the nude photographs of women.
“They both seem to be particularly arousing in an emotional way,” Most said. “Emotional stimuli can be rated in different ways. You could see something and rate how positive or negative it is. But separate from that is how arousing the image is. A positive picture of a cute puppy dog could be positive but not that arousing, whereas a picture of an opposite sex nude could be just as positive but be rated as extremely arousing. And a picture of a mutilation could be rated as extremely negative but highly arousing. Lately there’s been a lot of theories saying that what we’re drawn to is the arousing nature of an image regardless of whether we see it as negative or positive.”
I am not a psychologist but I think it would be very surprising if combining these arousing sexual and violent images did not result in twisting some people’s psyches. It cannot be healthy to get your thrills through deadly, bloody violence and sexual images in the same place, at the same time in the same way. The porn site is a “girlfriend and wife” site — it’s not professional porn stars. Those images of the naked girls next door are being given away for free to men who are posting pictures of mangled bodies of people they purport to hate with every fiber of their being. It is worlds colliding in a very dangerous way.
Sexual sado-masochism has been out there for millenia but it is highly ritualized fantasy. This is all too real. I have to think that it is problematic that people are getting so negatively and positively aroused by real death and gore at the same time.
There is something very disturbing about the images of sexual torture we’ve seen and heard about in this war, generally. The forced masturbation, the pyramids, the female interrogators and the fake menstrual blood, the constant nudity, all of it. Violence against prisoners in the new Human Rights Watch report is expressed as “fucking” instead of beating. Not “fucking up” or “fucking with” — just plain “fucking” as in “I walking in and saw him fucking the prisoner.”
I cannot help but think that something has gone terribly wrong here. From the top of the hierarchy ordering sexual humiliation techniques, to obscure web-sites selling war gore and pictures of girls next door together, this is a very sexualized war and it’s damned strange, particularly coming from a regime that pretends to be an arbiter of strict sexual morals.
It’s clear that the leadership of this country is extremely concerned with consensual sex between two adults but they find images of sexual violence and kinky torture techniques to be thoroughly acceptable among soldiers and useful to the war effort. This is a very odd perception and one that leads us back to the conclusion that something extremely unhealthy has invaded our body politic.
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Another “F” Word
I hesitate to bring this up because nothing is more impolitic these days. After reading excerpts from this article over at the Cunningrealist, I was quite taken aback. I knew that Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire was covered up but I was unaware that he was also a vocal opponent of the Iraq war.
My first shocking thought after reading it was that a high profile star like him could have been seen by someone as a very dangerous guy. He might have been fragged.
It’s hardly better that Americans killed him by accident. But it is better. I no longer trust what any official says about the Iraq war. There seem to be no limits. If it’s true that the military routinely forces innocent people into stress positions so painful they pass out, anything could be true. Even that.
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The Negroes Were Rising
About ten o’clock in the morning, there was an alarm of a fire at the house of serjeant Burns, opposite fort Garden….
Towards noon a fire broke out in the roof of Mrs. Hilton’s house…on the East side of captain Sarly’s house….Upon view, it was plain that the fire must have been purposely laid…. There was a cry among the people, the Spanish Negroes; the Spanish Negroes; take up the Spanish Negroes. The occasion of this was the two fires…happening so closely together….and it being known that Sarly had purchased a Spanish Negro, some time before brought into his port, among several others….and that they afterwards pretending to have been free men in their country, began to grumble at their hard usage, of being sold as slaves. This probably gave rise to the suspicion, that this Negro, out of revenge, had been the instrument of these two fires; and he behaving insolently upon some people’s asking him questions concerning them…it was told to a magistrate who was near, and he ordered him to jail, and also gave direction to constables to commit all the rest of that cargo [of Africans], in order for their safe custody and examination….
While the justices were proceeding to examination, about four o’clock there was another alarm of fire….
While the people were extinguishing the fire at this storehouse, and had almost mastered it, there was another cry of fire, which diverted the people attending the storehouse to the new alarm…but a man who had been on the top of the house assisting in extinguishing the fire, saw a Negro leap out at the end window of one of them…which occasioned him to cry out…that the Negroes were rising….
I wrote quite a bit about the fear of the black mob being the real reason why the response to Katrina was delayed in New Orleans and how this fear has been imprinted on the collective lizard brain of America since the early days of our history.
It appears to have been true once again:
Following days of internationally reported murders, rapes and gang violence inside the stadium, the doctor from FEMA — Beron doesn’t remember his name — came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
“I’ve got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome,” Beron recalled the doctor saying.
The real total?
Six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the handoff of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice.
State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been murdered inside the stadium.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies have been recovered, despite reports of heaps of dead piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been murdered, said health and law-enforcement officials.
That the nation’s frontline emergency-management officials believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the news media and even some of the city’s top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.
The vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees — mass murders, rapes and beatings — have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law-enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
“I think 99 percent of it is [expletive],” said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. “Don’t get me wrong — bad things happened. But I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything … 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body-recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities have only confirmed four murders in the entire city in the aftermath of Katrina — making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year.
“I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites,” he said. “It’s unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn’t the case. And they [national media outlets] have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases; they just accepted what people [on the street] told them. … It’s not consistent with the highest standards of journalism.”
It is, however, entirely consistent with a peculiar type of racism that sees a large group of African Americans as a recipe for violence and anarchy in the absence of strict control. And it’s this racism — not the kind of racism that would have had George W. Bush saying that he couldn’t be bothered saving people because he hates blacks — that played into the death and destruction of Katrina. We’ve managed to drive a lot of that overt hostility underground in the lat 40 years. The racist fear, however, is stoked every time a wily politician runs on the “law and order” platform.
Even the cops — or maybe especially the cops — were whipped into a frenzy:
As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation’s media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.
Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of “babies,” and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of “hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people” inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies “we couldn’t count.”
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an “almost animalistic state.”
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
“The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible,” Compass said, admitting his earlier statements were false. Asked the source of the information, Compass said he didn’t remember.
Nagin frankly acknowledged he doesn’t know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Superdome and the Convention Center — and may never. “I’m having a hard time getting a good body count,” he said.
Compass conceded that rumor had overtaken, and often crippled, authorities’ response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to situations that turned out not to exist.
Military, law-enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees — about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center — overwhelmed their security personnel.
The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds in the Dome, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence.
“Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated,” said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. “If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them — then that became 18.”
Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified — and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.
Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome’s locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt’s attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt’s leg came from his own gun — he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said.
Inside the Convention Center, Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Thursday. He said thugs hot-wired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, nor did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on about six occasions.
Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Col. Jacques Thibodeaux to put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center around noon on Friday.
It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. They found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any murders, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.
One widely circulated story, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsman, held that “30 or 40 bodies” were stored in a Convention Center freezer.
But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah’s Casino, said Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, who conducted the review.
I doubt that this will get the kind of wide coverage that the initial reports did. And those initial reports clearly indicate that relief was held back because of the alleged anarchy in the streets:
Violence disrupted relief efforts Thursday in New Orleans as authorities rescued desperate residents still trapped in the flooded city and tried to evacuate thousands of others living among corpses and human waste.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown said his agency was attempting to work “under conditions of urban warfare.”
Police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from armed miscreants roaming seemingly at will.
Officers warned a CNN crew to stay off the streets because of escalating danger, and cautioned others about attempted shootings and rapes by groups of young men.
They had to wait for more National Guard to put down the crazy violence. Remember, nobody could come in with relief supplies because it was too dangerous.
About 24,000 National Guard members will be in Louisiana and Mississippi by the end of the week to combat looting and quell gunfire that disrupted the rescue of survivors of Hurricane Katrina.U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said today at a news conference that 1,400 will go to New Orleans daily for the next three days, expanding a force of 3,000 that’s trying to maintain order in a city flooded and left without power by the storm three days ago.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said National Guardsmen from Arkansas were prepared to use deadly force as they try to restore order in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune reported.
Blanco said at a news conference today that the guardsmen “know how to shoot to kill … and I expect they will,” the New Orleans newspaper said.
Some rescue operations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were suspended in areas where gunfire broke out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington, the Associated Press reported. People trying to board amphibious vehicles outside New Orleans’s Charity Hospital were shot at while trying to evacuate, Cable News Network reported.
The Bush administration Official Katrina Talking Point these days is directed entirely at this situation. They are making the case that if the federal government had had direct control of the situation they could have called in the National Guard instead of ebing forced to wait for the hormonal, hysterical Kathleen Blanco to stop wringing her flighty hands and ask for them. The rationale seems to be that if they could have “secured” the city earlier there would have been a quicker response.
But it was fear of the black mob that prevented the relief agencies from entering the city — a paranoid delusion. The red cross and others could have come into the city days earlier. There were those who said that they shouldn’t be allowed to provide food and water because the evacuees would allegedly be so content that they would not be inclined to leave. But they were also told that they’d be mobbed by the crazed crowd and perhaps killed by the roving gangs of armed thugs who were raping babies and killing anyone who got in their way.
They have been able to confirm four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The same number that there would have been if Katrina had not hit. One of them took place at the Convention Center. There were no murders at the Superdome. The cop who was famously shot down by a roving gang actually shot himself in the leg by accident.
We don’t know how many people died because people were so afraid of the black mob that they would not allow relief workers with food, water and medical help into the city in the days after the flooding. I wonder if this tragic little lady made it to a more dignified place to live out her last days.
Dorothy Divic, 89, is surrounded by onlookers trying to keep her alive on a street outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005. Several people among the thousands of stranded hurricane evacuees have died while waiting outside the building, with no sign of imminent help on the way. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
Update: If you’ve been denied the opportunity to read this widely disseminated e-maim Snopes has it in its entirety. It starts off like this:
I’ve been watching the news lately and have seen scenes that have made me want to vomit. And no it wasn’t dead bodies, the city under water, or the sludge everywhere. It was PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOR. The people on T.V. (99% being Black) were DEMANDING help. They were not asking nicely but demanding as if society owed these people something. Well the honest truth is WE DON’T.
Help should be asked for in a kind manner and then appreciated. This is not what the press (FOX in particular) was showing, what I was seeing was a group of people who are yelling, demanding, looting, killing, raping, and SHOOTING back at the demanded help!
And so it goes. And FoxNews is reporting that authorities are doing backround checks on evacuees who are seeking shelter and over half have criminal records.
“It’s a balancing act,” said Kyle Smith, deputy director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (search). “We don’t want to treat them like criminals after they have been traumatized, but we want to make sure they are in no danger nor the families they are housed with.”
No word on those who have enough money to stay in hotels. Lock up the white women.
Update II:
I am aware that both Compass and Nagin are black. African Americans were also usually the ones who blew the whistle on slave revolts. It’s a complicated psychology. Certainly one can understand why people in jobs of trust and authority would want to distance themselves from a group that is so widely feared and reviled.
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And So It Begins
Via media matters:
LIMBAUGH: From the Associated Press, Mary Dalrymple doing the honors of writing this story. “House and Senate tax writers agreed yesterday to a package of tax breaks designed to help Hurricane Katrina victims recoup their losses and access needed cash. The Congressional Research Service, an office that provides lawmakers with nonpartisan legislative analysis, said some of those tax breaks could do more for higher income survivors than for the neediest.”
Yes. People, they’re going to get tax breaks for Katrina. It may help the rich more. The rich may benefit more from taxes and tax cuts that result from Hurricane Katrina. We should rethink this, ladies and gentlemen. Even though the rich were wiped out too, they still may benefit more. I will guarantee you this, ladies and gentlemen: Many of those getting tax cuts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will not have paid any taxes at all. The people who pay taxes today are primarily the upper middle class, the rich, whatever you’re going to call them, and the filthy wealthy.
It’s not worth it to try to specifically decifer his incoherant ramblings, but the message comes through anyway.
Poor people are going to be getting something they don’t deserve. And I think we know which poor people he is talking about.
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