ken

The premise of this, aside from the deliberate use of inflammatory language, is simple.

The purpose of society is the care and feeding of the downtrodden. Period. Everything else is either a wasteful distraction or an unconscionable diversion of resources from this overriding purpose.

Note that the thread is not (for the most part) claiming that Bush had anything to do with the hurricane, or that anyone actually intended for the city’s poor minorities to remain in harm’s way. Instead, the claim is that the Administration and the country as a whole did not devote enough resources to the evacuation and protection of the city’s poor (and planning for same), that this was motivated by indifference to the poor, and that indifference is practically as evil as malice.

Is this true?

I’ll pick out one comment to illustrate the moral premise at issue:

“If it were 100K white middle class folk wading through water to their necks or trapped in their attics, the whole country would stop and hold it’s breath …. baseball games would be suspended, church services would be initiated, etc. The powerful and wealthy are safe and sound….. they’ve left the meek and the powerless to fend for themselves.”

The first part has never been empirically demonstrated, and the last part is demonstrably false, but never mind that. Supposing that the last part is true, the powerful and wealthy are safe and sound because they fended for themselves successfully. It wasn’t just the meek and powerless left to fend for themselves – in the alternate world where no one was rescued by helicopter or given shelter in the Superdome, everyone was left to fend for themselves! This is unconscionable bigotry?

Now there are human beings that civilized people have a positive duty to protect, to feed and shelter and plan for and rescue from or use force to prevent their own foolish behavior as needed. They’re called children. So is it really unconscionable bigotry to treat the downtrodden as if they weren’t children? And it’s not bigotry to treat them as if they were children, who could not, for instance, be counted upon to consider the possible implications of living in a disaster area waiting to happen without a car?

On the one hand, hell yes. It’s stealing. And why should people have to choose between risking their lives in a storm and losing all their property to looters in the aftermath?

On the other hand, this is the same state that forbids private entities from being paid for the cost of transporting essential items into a disaster area (or preserving them during a disaster, or stocking them up against the possibility of a disaster) when selling them to disaster victims. According to the state, this is “gouging”, and it means you’re SOL until charity or taxpayer funded disaster relief reaches you. So where does that state get off stopping you from taking the things you must have to survive that it has left you unable to buy, especially when the owners may or may not ever be coming back?

On the gripping hand, are you really justified in stealing when it was your own outrageously poor decision that caused you to be there in the first place? If others have to pay the price for your idiocy, you don’t have much of a case when you ask them to let you make your own decisions on, well, anything. That way the lifelong nursery lies, and we’re a good part of the way there already. (Granted, this reasoning doesn’t apply to all large-scale disasters, but it sure as hell applies to this one.)

A recurring theme in the comments about Iran is that we could have dealt with Iran if only Bush hadn’t foolishly squandered our resources and our people’s trust with his horrible misadventure in Iraq.

What are we supposed to make of this?

Well, first of all, I’d say that an insurgency and a thousand deaths per year is a small price to pay to keep Muslim fanatics from getting nuclear weapons. If we can bungle Iran four times as badly as Iraq, but ensure there’ll never be any nuclear weapons to find there, we’ll be way ahead of the game. The Iranian government cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons – their officials have made too many flippant comments about the advantages of a nuclear exchange with Israel (a.k.a. the Little Satan; remember who the Great Satan is?), for one thing, and for another thing Iran is known to sponsor terrorist groups that it will have no incentive whatsoever to restrain once it has its own nuclear weapons. Even if they never use nukes on us, how’d you like Iranian sponsored terrorists frequently setting off regular bombs in the US?

So the prospect of “another Iraq disaster” sounds pretty damn good to me compared to the alternatives.

Now, assuming that we decide to use force to deal with Iran, would we be in a better or worse position if we hadn’t dealt with Iraq? Without a large body of troops already in Iraq, how exactly would we invade Iran? Over the mountains of Afghanistan? From Kuwait? Let’s not be silly. Not only that, if you don’t think we can invade Iran with an active insurgency in Iraq, how’d you like to try an invasion and occupation of Iran with Saddam Hussein in power next door? Maybe invade both at once? (Actually, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea two years ago… better to be hung for a sheep, as they say. What’re people going to do, accuse us of imperialism?).

Finally, let’s take a look at this “betrayal” that supposedly has all right thinking people aghast at the very idea of doing any other military operation anywhere in the world…

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Heinlein’s heroine Maureen Johnson had this to say in To Sail Beyond the Sunset:

But why are the people of the United States and their government always the villains in the eyes of the revisionists? Why can’t our enemies – such as the king of Spain, and the kaiser, and Hitler, and Geronimo, and Villa, and Sandino, and Mao Tse-tung, and Jefferson Davis – why can’t these each take a turn in the pillory? Why is it always our turn?

This was written in 1982, so of course Saddam Hussein is not mentioned. But he’d fit right in, and the question still stands more than 20 years later.

Now of course serious historical research does turn up some less than savory aspects of the character of our nation’s heroes. And it can be depressing to note, for instance, that the man who wrote that it was “self-evident” that all men were created equal failed to apply that self-evident notion to his own slaves.

But we must keep our perspective. It’s the words, more than the men themselves, that influence us across the generations and make our country what it is today. And Jefferson’s words, long after his death, motivated men who took those words more seriously than he did to take up arms and drive slavery off of our continent.

But in any case, it doesn’t make sense to compare flesh-and-blood rulers against ideal rulers unless you know of some way to produce those ideal rulers. So far, no such rulers have shown up; until they do, I’ll take most any American President and Congress, past or present, over the available alternatives. Or, as Ashish Hanwadikar notes, after linking to one of the less savory alleged actions of the Lincoln administration:

It is a fact that our leaders are made up of myths! Beyond their great legacies lies some horrible crimes that we choose to ignore because it doesn’t fit the great leader story! If this is case in a free society, I shudder to think how much horrible “leaders” like Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mugabe, KIM Jong Il and others!

So true! Our guys aren’t the only ones that hide skeletons in their closets. Which means, given what we already know about some of the non-Americans, past and present, that (mis)ruled various parts of the Earth, their skeletons must be frightening indeed.