XPost: tennessee.general, dc.general, soc.culture.canada
XPost: tx.general, ca.general
From: AsItIs@terre.com
Very right. Bush did right. Also right; what Canada can accomplish in a
disaster is zilch.
"Anonymouse" wrote in message
news:43470B7C.4020803@nowhere.com...
> 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,
> D.C. 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 U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and
> National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally
> consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russell Honore, it was once
> again the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 programs. 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 floodwaters
> 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 U.S. federal government's legal, constitutional,
> and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any
> natural disaster, was zero.
>
> 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 co-ordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in
> human history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently
> presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious
> and childish blame-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
> gliberals 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..
>
> --
> "Disperse, you rebels -- Damn you, throw down your arms and disperse!"
> Maj. John Pitcairn (British Army), Lexington, Mass., April 19, 1775
>
> --
>
> "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb
> yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his
> kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
>
> And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after
> his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself,
> after his kind: and God saw that it was good."
>
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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