The Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 13/09/2005)
'Flood That Released America's Demons", said the Sun on Saturday. Underneath the arresting headline was a column by Jeremy Clarkson, and, after the usual good-natured knockabout - "Most Americans barely have the brains to walk on their back legs" - he turned to the desperate scenes being played out in New Orleans: "On the streets you've got some poor, starving soul helping themselves to a packet of food from a ruined, deserted supermarket. And as a result, finding themselves being blown to pieces by a helicopter gunship. With the none-too-bright soldiers urged on by their illiterate political masters, the poor and needy never stood a chance. It's easier and much more fun to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea.
"Especially if they're black."
I have to agree with Jeremy there. It is easier to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea. Especially if you're the US Marine Corps and you're making tea for some Brit columnist: don't forget to warm the pot. Pour the milk before the water - or is it the other way round? Who the hell can stay on top of it all? Easier to pull out the .44 Magnum and say: "Go ahead, punk, make my Earl Grey."
So, instead of Special Forces rappelling down with steaming samovars of PG Tips strapped to their backs, the helicopter gunships blew the poor needy starving blacks to pieces.
Hmm. I must have dozed off during that bit on CNN.
I'll leave it to future generations of historians to settle the precise moment at which Hurricane Katrina finally completed its transformation into a Kansas-type twister, and swept up the massed ranks of the world's press to deposit them on the wilder shores of the Land of Oz. But for a couple of weeks now they've been there frolicking and gambolling as happy Media Munchkins, singing and dancing "Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead".
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm is exhausted, meteorologically and politically. Power has been restored to the whole of Mississippi (much quicker than in Euro-style big-government Quebec during the 1998 ice storm, incidentally), the Big Easy is being pumped free of water far ahead of anybody's expectations, and, as the New York Times put it: "Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared".
No truth in the rumour that early editions read "Than First Hoped".
Still, the media could never quite disguise the impression that their principal enthusiasm for this story derived from its potential as "the Bush Administration's political nemesis," as The Sunday Telegraph's Niall Ferguson put it. Predicting a back-to-the-Seventies economic slump, Prof Ferguson noted that post-Katrina "gasoline prices in some parts of the United States soared to $5 a gallon".
I wonder where. In New Hampshire this weekend, gas was back below three bucks a gallon and heading south. Undeterred, the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland got out his crystal ball - for the 2004 election: "It's safe to say that if George Bush was in his first term, he would now be heading for defeat."
C'mon, man, how lame is that? At least Gavin Macdonald, a reader in Amsterdam writing to mock "Mark Steyn's dependly nutty take", is confident enough to declare that "the Republicans' chances of winning the next election are already pretty much over".
Let me dispel Messrs Freedland and Macdonald's illusions: there will be no political consequences from Hurricane Katrina.
Apart from anything else, it would seem unlikely that in the 2006 elections voters in states unafflicted by Katrina would eschew Republican incumbents and stampede to vote for the party that's given us the New Orleans Police Department, its clown mayor and Louisiana's sob-sister governor. But forget the question of jurisdictional responsibility and instead grant the critics their fraudulent argument that this is all the fault of the federal government - ie, Bush and the Republicans. Why then will it have no electoral fallout?
For the answer, let's go to Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. At a meeting in the White House last week, she had the guts to walk up to the flailing Bush and demand he immediately fire the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"Why?" asked Bush.
"Well," said Mrs Pelosi, and then paused. "For everything." Another pause. "It was so slow."
"Thank you for your advice," said the President drily. I'm often dismissed as a Bush cheerleader, though I disagree with him on immigration, education and bombing Syria. But come on, a guy doesn't have to be great to be better than Nancy Pelosi, the armchair general of armchair generalities.
These days, the Republicans are the party of small government and the party of big government, and the party of all points in between. The Democrats, meanwhile, are the party of emotive know-nothings, the go-to guys for soap-operatic sobbing and righteous histrionics. You can understand why the 24-hour cable-news networks love the Dems. Just stick a camera in front of New Orleans's Mayor Nagin: "To those who would criticise, where the hell were you?" he roared the other day. "Where the hell were you?" In a town you're not the mayor of, happily. That's how most Americans react. But the media think, wow, this is great television, he really socks it to Bush. And, if life were an especially bad daytime soap, he would. But ask Democrats for specifics and they're either as blank as Mrs Pelosi or as mired in their ancient tropes as Jesse Jackson, who demanded Bush appoint more high-ranking blacks to the hurricane relief effort. Charges of Republican "racism" rang particularly hollow in the context of New Orleans, where sodden blacks might be better advised to ponder what they have to show for being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party for four decades.
Unlike other dead horses flogged by the media - Cindy Sheehan, torture at Guantanamo, etc - this was at one point a real story: an actual hurricane, people dying, things going wrong. But that wasn't good enough, and the more they tossed in to damage Bush, the more they drowned any real controversy in the usual dreary pseudo-controversy. After watching Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu threatening to punch out the President, a reader e-mailed me Kipling: "If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you."
That's all Bush had to do. The storm has passed.
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