Stephen Spruiell takes Blumenthal to task:
The hurricane of hatred that the left has unleashed at President Bush in the wake of Katrina has taken many voices, but the most telling might be Sidney Blumenthal’s. His latest effort demonstrates that even though Bush could have done little to mitigate the damage of the worst natural disaster in American history, this hurricane gives the left an opportunity to vent all their accumulated greivances over Bush’s environmental policies.
Blumenthal starts out by trying to lay blame for the hurricane at Bush’s feet, citing two examples of how Bush policies made the aftermath worse. First, he says, Bush cut funding for Army Corps of Engineers flood control efforts. According to Blumenthal, “A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken.”
This story, already widely discussed on the left, was addressed yesterday in a lengthy and well-sourced post on RedState.org:
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.
Blumenthal then argues that, “The Bush administration’s policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge.” But development was never a real threat to the wetlands ? they were eroded away by a Mississippi River that was never allowed to flood. As MSNBC technology correspondent Bob Sullivan reported:
Several factors ? most human-made ? have contributed to the steady decline of the delta at the bottom of the Mississippi. But most of the erosion is blamed on the levees, which faithfully steer all the water from the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. That prevents occasional flooding, keeping area residents above water most of the time. But one unforeseen consequence of the levees has been to cut off wetlands from their life force.
The regular floods served nature’s purpose by feeding the delta, bringing fresh water and sediment that served to sustain life and replenish the wetlands. Without the regular flooding, the wetlands naturally ?compact.?
?Simply put, when the land does not have any nutrients and fresh water it dies,? Marmillion said.
In other words, humans’ systematic efforts to control the Mississippi ? not a Bush plot to give the wetlands to Halliburton ? gradually wore down the wetlands.
But Blumenthal just used these shots in the dark as an excuse to catalog again, for the record, a host of left-wing animosities toward Bush:
At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes… [snip]
In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA’s scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda ? the result of the administration’s evangelical Christian agenda of “abstinence.” When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers’ chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.
Dude, don’t forget ? he lied about WMD, he went to war for oil, and he stole the election! Twice!!
While the left is stooping low to exploit this tragedy, Blumenthal is positively hugging the ground. What the hell do condom shortages in Uganda have to do with homeless people in New Orleans? If you belong to the cult of Bush hatred, you already know the answer.
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