Brit Hume, The Grapevine at Fox News, reports:
A New York Times editor, oh, by the way, asked, "Why New Orleans’ levees remained so inadequate? Where was Congress before it wandered off to vacation engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area’s flood protection?"
The answer may be that they were reading old "Times" editorials. In 1993, the Times wrote that Washington should, "resist pressure to spend more on flood-control projects." In 1997, the Times praised moderate Republicans for protecting the environment by blocking flood-control spending.
And in April of this year, the Times ripped a Senate bill that would have injected $17 billion into flood-control measures, including what the Times called a $2.7 billion boondoggle on the Mississippi River, saying that bill was "bad legislation."
Richard Baehr, at The American Thinker, writes:
- Reality #1: A very high percentage of the population of New Orleans and surrounding low lying areas were successfully evacuated before the hurricane hit.
If 80% of New Orleans got out before disaster hit, instead of 40% or 60%, that is an additional 100,000 to 200,000 residents who were spared the worst of this week's trauma. For this the President deserves credit, which he will not receive. Remember that the focus all week has been on the slow response to assist the 20% who did not get out. There is plenty to criticize in what happened this week for the 20% left behind, but it does not diminish the achievement in getting 80% of the residents of the city to safety before the storm hit.
Reality #2: The basic major media premise all week has been that the 20% who were left behind were all black, and poor and the rich got out of town.
New Orleans is a poor city (more than twice the national poverty rate). Most of those who got out of town were not rich, and were not driving SUVs, as Tim Russert sneered on the air Sunday (in a disgracefully-conducted interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff).
A little elementary math will address this canard. According to the 2000 census, New Orleans' population of 484,000 included approximately 136,000 whites, and 326,000 blacks. The white figure includes 7,000 Hispanics who classify themselves as white on the census forms. If 80% of New Orleans residents got out early – and this is the Mayor's number – then only about 97,000 residents remained. Assume all of them were black, (which of course they were not). That would mean that 229,000 blacks got out early, and 136,000 whites along with them. In other words, the successful mass evacuation substantially benefited black residents of the city.
- Reality #3: The destruction from the storm affected far more whites than blacks.
If more whites than blacks were storm and flood victims, and the federal response was slow, than I guess by this logic, the response was insufficient because Bush is a racist towards whites. As James Taranto pointed out Friday, in his opinionjournal.com, the three Mississippi counties that were hardest hit - Hancock (home to Pass Christian), Harrison (home to Biloxi and Gulfport), and Jackson (home to Pascagoula and Ocean Springs) are among the whitest counties in Mississippi, the state with the highest African American percentage of the population in the country (36.3% in 2003). But in these three counties, the white population in 2003 was estimated at 280,311, and the black population was 71,070, a white to black ratio of 4 to 1.
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