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KATRINA: Blame Game, Part III

February 17, 1995:

Clinton administration officials argue that the flood-control efforts are local projects, not national, and should be paid for by local taxes.

Nationwide, the administration proposes cutting 98 new projects in 35 states and Puerto Rico, for an estimated savings of $29 million in 1996.

June 23, 1995

The Clinton administration is holding back a Corps of Engineers report recommending that the $120 million project proceed. Unless that report is forwarded to the Office of Management and Budget, Congress cannot authorize money for the project, U.S. Rep. William Jefferson's office said Thursday.

June 19, 1996

But even so, when the Clinton administration began to curtail spending on flood control and other projects a year ago, the corps stopped spending on Section 205 projects even after deciding to do a $70,000 preliminary Jean Lafitte study, Spohrer said.

July 22, 1999

Most of the projects received significant increases over what the Clinton administration had proposed. The exception: general flood control projects for southeast Louisiana, which remained at the $47 million suggested by Clinton. Local officials had hoped for double that amount.

February 8, 2000

For the metropolitan New Orleans area, Clinton's budget was seen as a mixed bag by local lawmakers and government officials. For instance, while Clinton called for $1.5 billion to be spent at Avondale Industries to continue building LPD-17 landing craft, his budget calls for significantly less than what Congress appropriated last year for Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity hurricane protection and for West Bank flood control projects.

September 29, 2000

President Clinton is promising to veto the annual appropriation for the Energy Department and Army Corps of Engineers, not because it is $890 million larger than he proposed, but because it does not include a plan to alter the levels of the Missouri River to protect endangered fish and birds.

KATRINA: Blame Game. Part II

More from Baehr in The American Thinker:

Congress has a $14 billion proposal designed to reverse this process, to restore the wetlands that provide buffers against storms. This would also help keep the city of New Orleans from continually sinking further below sea level.  But Congress has chosen other big projects as worthier of its attention. The Big Dig, a $15 billion project to bury two miles of a highway in central Boston was the favored public works project that President Clinton awarded Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.  The Everglades has a $7 billion project to accomplish some of what needs to be done in the Mississippi River basin

Quibbling over small budget changes has been another opportunity for some to accuse the Bush Administration of causing this disaster, as is now the comically-predictable standard operating procedure in the MSM. For the record, the levees which broke had recently been reinforced and repaired.

The mythology on Katrina is now out there: only blacks were victims, Bush ignored the city because of this, the levees broke because of Bush budget cuts, the response was inadequate because the National Guard was in Iraq.  In all case, these are new urban legends. 

For some, what happened this week is a big plus. It has weakened the President politically, and that is all that matters. The President and his team are certainly not blame-free. But if some people think that dealing with what happened this week could have been straightforward, clear, clean and quick, they are divorced from reality. America has never lost a major city before.

KATRINA: The Blame Game, Part I

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.