New Orleans Tragedy

The title of this post is actually rather misleading. The Associated Press is reporting that hundreds of National Guard troops will be deployed to New Orleans this next month as an anti-crime measure. So far as I know, martial law has yet to be declared.

Using soldiers to keep the civil peace has always been problematic. Troops equipped and trained to defeat another nation’s military are ill suited to arresting street gangs and investigating crimes. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, the two politicians behind this decision, understand that well enough to emphasize that the NG troops will have “law enforcement experience”. The news article linked to above doesn’t mention which units will be used in NO, so there is no way to tell if they will confine themselves to using MP’s and refrain from having regular troops patrol the streets.

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Government bids have not always been handled with transparency. My father found, in his short-lived & bitter experience as county engineer in the reddest, most heartland of states, that taxpayers were likely to prefer bids a bit more open than did commissioners. Pajamasmedia links to an AP story on hearings about the New Orleans levee failure; apparently, the lines of authority weren’t clear or at least the local commissioners didn’t take seriously their roles as “inspectors.” This confusion of responsibilities seemed to underlie the discussion on Lehrer tonight, as Margaret Warner kept after Donald Powell. Who was going to supervise the Corps of Engineers she asked; of course, they’d built the failed levees. As with everything about New Orleans, the hearings indicate sufficient blame to go around. (And we all understand what happens when everyone is kind of responsible and no one is held responsible.)

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A special Congressional hearing was held today to determine if the slow response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was due to racism.

The evacuees who gave testimony got pretty intense when describing their ordeal. They said that American troops aimed guns at young girl’s heads, living in temporary shelters was deadly, and that they’re victims of a crime as big as the Holocaust.

Uh huh. The US government set up death camps and shoveled millions of black residents into the ovens. Got it.

That surely happened because, if it didn’t, then the people who testified are nothing but a bunch of jerks who are trying to game the system for their own gain.

I’ve seen a great deal of this hysterical crap over the past few years, particularly from the Left. What they can’t seem to understand is that comparing having to go hungry for a day or two to actual genocide isn’t impressive or compelling. They can claim that they’re the biggest victims in the world all they want, most of us can tell what real vicitmization and genocide really looks like.

Something tells me that they’re not going to shut up, though. Not while they’re being invited to Washington to speak in front of a Congressional committee.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Instapundit links to two stories: his column on the 135 girls to 100 guys that graduate each year from college and the Times-Picayunes’s reporting of the inaccuracy of reports of violence & death in New Orleans:

That the nation’s front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans’ top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent.

And of course, I, too, was at fault – whipping out Melville far too quickly.

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