You did not have to be a reader of this website to anticipate that the Media around the Western World would soon be busy orchestrating an anti-Bush campaign out of the New Orleans natural disaster. The ingredients were just right. A Democratic State Governor, a Black Democratic Mayor and Council and a largely African American population.
For obvious reasons, it is foolish to blame such disasters and their immediate aftermath on anyone, not even Leftist politicians and Public Service Bureaucrats. The scope and unpredictability of this particular natural disaster was bound to overwhelm all preceeding (and subsequent) reactions. No Government can go about its daily business as well as make adequate provision for all the possible scenarios wrought by extreme nature.
Still, it ill behoves the people of New Orleans to cast blame around. They have always known more intimately than anyone else that their city was below the waterline and in the path of hurricanes. For perhaps many reasons they have never done much planning to protect the city. Anyone who has spent time in the Big Easy will know that outside the tourist money-spinner known as the French Quarter, the city was not safe for non-Black people, especially after dark. It always seemed to this writer that the local population contained a lot of predatory young men and that law enforcement was not to be trusted. I think this may not always have been the case, but ever since President Johnson’s Great Society welfare programme, a great many African American city areas have sunk into crime and dependency. New Orleans was a classic case and some of the events of the last few days – looting, rape and shooting at rescuers would be unimaginable in most other ethnic-dominated places in America. We can only speculate, but I doubt that Chinese or Korean or Mexican populations would have been so lawless or so ready to blame others.
This website is primarily concerned to look at how events are used by the Media to advance its own agenda and how it twists, spins, conceals and lies to manipulate public opinion. “Get Bush” is always a major part of the agenda, so we see every report nuanced to make him look inept and/or uncaring. The agenda also benefits from alienating minorities from the mainstream and creating hostility and a sense of grievance aomongst them. African Americans have been a very fruitful source of groundless grievance over recent years, from the Florida election of 2000 to Ohio in 2004. It may be that the whingers, wallowing in victimology, are only a relatively small minority of a minority, but the Media Class ensures they get the bully pulpit. Thus we now hear that Bush doesn’t care about Black people and that if the victims of the floods had been White, then much more would have been done. Media people love this! Does anybody really believe it? Probably yes, if they now hear it repeated enough times.
This website maintains that after any event, the earliest Media reports are likely to be the most truthful and then the Media Class gets proper control over the information in order to tailor it to fit the agenda. So, what you heard or read on the first day is nearest to the truth and ignore it all from now on.
During the Second World War, when English cities were bombed nightly and many people lost their lives, many more became homeless and destitute. I lived amongst such people in temporary housing. My neighbors never complained and if they blamed anyone it was Hitler. They got on with making the best of what they had been given and were grateful for help. Of course, they hadn’t been raised to be welfare-dependent, but perhaps, more importantly, the Media in those days was not the dominant class in Society and simply reported news rather than used it to pursue an agenda. If that were true today, there would be no finger-pointing and accusations of blame, just a society working together to repair things. Maybe the Rev Jesse Jackson, the Rev Al Sharpton and the NAACP would all be busy putting together convoys of food and clothing and not looking for the AP reporter or the CNN camera.
They say that every cloud has a silver lining and this one is no exception. Cindy Sheehan has been put on page two by the Media Class. Perhaps she and her caravan of Media people will head for the Big Easy and the front pages.