Cheap Shot(s)
Well:
And now: the Storm and the Flood, which have inundated the Gulf Coast in deadly water. This is, literally, an invasion of the homeland, and it will require a warlike response from a nation and a military already stretched thin. National Guard officials insist that they have enough men and women on hand to do the job, but common sense tells you that they could use the others stationed abroad. The U.S. Navy is dispatching supply ships to the region, but battling the waters that cover the region will require many more resources.
That’s the usually-respectable Howard Fineman, writing for Newsweek. I guess Fineman’s complaint is, Bush wasn’t prescient enough to realize we’d need more troops at home to battle natural disasters.
Well, guess what: War is why we have armies. Most of the time, thankfully, we aren’t at war. So rather than keep the troops in their barracks or the ships at anchor when disaster strikes, we call on them to serve in a different manner. Fineman’s complain strikes me as just plain silly. I guess FDR would have taken a double-drubbing over Hitler’s 1944 Ardennes Offensive, had there been a big California earthquake in the Spring of 1945.
I mean, the Battle of the Bulge added an extra three or four months to the European Theater of War. Had FDR not screwreed things up so badly, those troops could have been waging peace in California instead of waging war in Europe.
Is there anyone left on the Left who hasn’t tried to make political hay out of Hurricane Katrina?
(Skippy excepted, of course.)
UPDATE: Cirby comments:
They’re deploying 20,000 National Guard troops across the whole disaster area.
The largest deployment in history.
If they decide to double that (not likely), it’s be up to 40,000.
Which means that they will have deployed about one-seventh of the National Guard soldiers left in the US after Iraq deployments.
You’d think that Howard Fineman, with all the resources of Newsweek/MSNBC/The Washington Post at his disposal, could have come up with those (ahem) sobering figures.
A catastrophie brings out the best and the worst in all of us. Witness the selfless acts of aid and kindness in contrast to the looters and other assorted scum.
Likewise this hurricane has brought out the worst on both sides of the political spectrum, but far more noticably on the left.
It has been obvious for some time now, just how shameless, craven and morally/ethically bankrupt the left is. These hateful lies from the usual suspects further reinforce not only their shameless use of a natural catastrophe to lay false blame in the hope of furthering their political agaenda. It also shows the lack of humanity at the core of their beings.
You have to ask yourself what kind of smug phoney asshole tries to blame the president, republicans, neocons, take your pick, when the bodies are still floating in the streets?
They’re deploying 20,000 National Guard troops across the whole disaster area.
The largest deployment in history.
If they decide to double that (not likely), it’s be up to 40,000.
Which means that they will have deployed about one-seventh of the National Guard soldiers left in the US after Iraq deployments.
Didn’t the governor of Louisiana specifically say that they already had more troops available than they could effectively use? (Hurricanes can, after all, pose logistical problems for deployment that more men on the ground would only make _worse_ rather than better.)
We have enough helicopters available in the US to darken the skies over new Orleans and the other hard-hit areas, but there are two huge problems.
One, air traffic would be horrendous, and we’d be losing crews to midair collisions. Some of the Coast Guard and National Guard aircrews have already commented on this.
Two, you gotta coordinate where they’ve been and where they’re going, while keeping them fueled and working.
The same goes for pretty much all of the disaster relief efforts. You could throw ten times as many bodies at the problem, but it wouldn’t do ten times as much good (and might actually do less).
Something else that keeps slipping by: people have to get there (which takes time), with *stuff*.
Putting a thousand soldiers into New Orleans or Biloxi without a few thousand tons of supplies and equipment is worse than just leaving things alone. Without all of the hardware and food and such, you just added a few thousand new refugees with cleaner clothes.
Fineman realizes that he and his buddies can’t get away with business as usual anymore. He’s been on the Fox News panel with Brit Hume and in his best academic stutter equivocates and tries to sound thoughtful, but unfortunately for him, he comes across as merely smarmy. In his defense, I’d be pretty terrified to have the great Charles Krauthammer’s steely eyes on me while I attempted to do a little spinning of the facts. Who knows, maybe he really does want to do the right thing, but he just doesn’t have the guts to come right out and tell the truth.
What’s interesting is that Bobby Kennedy, the younger, had to resort to the Puff to get in his smear of Haley Barbour. In a previous life, Bobby’s remarks would have gotten headlines in major newspapers and face time on the network news. Sid Vicious, once a darling of the Washington media, is reduced to writing articles for leftwing European news outlets like the Guardian and Der Spiegal on-line.
Noteworthy too, is that no prominent Democrat has as yet come forward to blame Bush and the WoT for the devastation. Of course, it’ll be a week or so before the focus group results are in and the DNC will probably wait until then before they send the talking points memo to their operatives in congress.
Meanwhile the rest of us will do what we can to help those in need. I wouldn’t be surprised if the donations reached into to hundreds of millions.
Thanks Stephen for the information about the Mennonites. I’m always reluctant to give to the large charities, but if this one has your endorsement, I’ll send my contribution there.
Sidney Blumenthal, former Clinton smear merchant has penned an article for the Guardian which is on Drudge this morning. Saying to the effect that “we should have seen this coming” and it’s Bush’s fault, etc, etc.
Now I’ve always supported this administration’s foreign policy, though disagreed with some of its domestic agenda so I’m not a dyed in the wool Bushie, but these partisan jabs by Blumenthal, Kennedy and almost all of the leftie blogs really burn me. I thought that in a time of crisis we all rolled up our sleeves and pitched in to help however we could, regardless of politics, religion, race, ethnicity, yada yada?
I find this type of malicious glee on the part of way too many people is very disturbing.
As I said above, I think it reflects more on them, than they really would like to reveal about themselves.
Don’t you know that only National Guard troops from those states affected can help in those states?
At least, that seems to be the demented political left argument. My common sense says that other states have National Guard contingents, and I just bet some of those will be activated to assist in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Like we always do.
They’ve already sent a group of National Guardsmen from Colorado to help.
Larry J
3 Units from the North Dakota guard have been warned to prep for possible activation. They are engineering units and recently back from Iraq….they build stuff….So it will be no suprise that other engineering units will be activated when the time comes for them to go help build infrastructure again.
Michigan National Guard units have also been put on alert for southern deployment.
Ditto for Florida. Nineteen search and rescue boat teams already in the region, with 600 more troops ready to go. Up to 8500 if the need arose.
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the surrounding states have over 100,000 National Guard troops available, right now.
Of course, the soldiers who are being sent in have lots of recent practical experience in rebuilding and working in horrible conditions.
Along with Tim P, I’m not a dedicated Bush supporter either. We need a true two party system to instigate reasonable debate and moderate compromises. However, the knee jerk scripted MooreOn logic spewing forth from the democrat operatives and their mouthpieces in the MSM is discrediting them as a valid oposition party, driving this previously split ticket voter to cast entirely GOP ballots. On the other hand, the positive comments and outpouring of support that I see on this and other right of center blogs for the victims is inspirational. I’ll definately open up my wallot today.
thanks for the good thoughts, stephen.
just stopped by to tell you i matched your original donation (which you gave before you matched my original donation), but instead of umcor, which doesn’t have an online donation capability, i gave $100.01 to the mercy corps, which has a very fine rating for charities.
keep up the good work on your side of blogtopia! and yes! i coined that phrase!
Oh go fuck yourself, you pompous, primping douchebag.
And have fun watching your incompetent Repubs go down in flames in 06.