George Bush, the man.
David Warren. The Ottawa
Citizen Sunday,
September 11, 2005
There's plenty wrong with America,
since you asked. I'm tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that
they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often
pleased to discover things we still get right.
But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up
here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive
late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the
government in Louisiana just waved and pointed
at Washington, DC The theory being that, when you're in
real trouble, that's where the adults live.
And that isn't an exaggeration! Almost everything that has worked in the
recovery operation along the US Gulf Coast has been military and National Guar
d. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the
remarkable Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, it was once again the US military
efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the
capacity of any other earthly institution.
We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government
after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We
don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should
disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third
World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no
avail.
>From Democrats and the American Left -- the US
equivalent to the people who run Canada
-- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed that a heartless, white
Republican America had abandoned its underclass.
This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted
housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and government support
through many other program s. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to
lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor
they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses that
could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.
Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we
must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of
haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the flood waters
rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out.
But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their
various entitlements have been directed to new locations.
The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no
statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to
have been arch-Republican Texas
and that, nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming
disproportionately from people who vote Republican. For the world divides
into "the mouths" and "the
wallets."
The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with
reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.
Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and you will learn that the US federal
government's legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first
response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero. Suppose natural
disasters occurred in 5 or 6 areas at the same time. Local governmental bodies
must, legally and morally, take charge.
Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a
disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full
days in advance of the storm fall. In the little time since, he has managed to
coordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human history --
without invoking martial powers He has been sufficiently residential to
respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish bl
ame-throwing.
One thinks of Kipling's poem If, which I learned to recite as a lad, and
mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and
liberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:
"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise"
Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses.
A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.
"Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men
stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell
