Interesting. I’ve been largely off-line for two days tending to Real Life Duties. I kept hearing about Haiti with various voices pleading for donations and uttering dire predictions if we didn’t immediately all leap in and offer our hands out in help.

And I kept thinking to myself, “I don’t think so.” That we’ve been funding this, that and the other thing in Haiti for decades and they rae *still* poorpoorpoor, so this Tsunami-like funding effort strikes me as being just a new way for the money-grubbers at the top of the Haitian food chain to dip into the American taxpayer’s pocket.

Not to mention that somehow the funding pleas seem to have a hint of the same sort of politically correct “we must all help our black brothers” that EVERYthing that comes out of Obama’s White House seems to have.

So I wasn’t eager to leap to the front nor to dig out my credit card to see an dollars winging off to Haiti. Nor am I thrilled to hear that our military’s *top* priority is now the aid effort in Haiti — can we make Haiti our military’s second priority and keep America itself the military’s TOP priority?

And now I dip into Belmont Club and find that I am not alone in my skepticism and reluctance, and that, indeed, BC-ers are ten steps ahead of me (as usual) and making comparisons to Katrina that hadn’t occurred to me but are doubtless part and parcel of the disinterest and disgust I myself have been feeling about the whole Haitian guilt trip.

My bottom line question is, “how many of these people would be dead in a few months any way, with or without earthquakes, dollars for assistance, or the American military’s expertise?”