AGRV8D

iTrader: (19)

George Bush, the man
David Warren.The Ottawa Citizen

Sunday, September 11, 2005

There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I'm tempted to
say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things
right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover
things we still get right.

But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something
happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the
resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save
us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at
Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real trouble, that's
where the adults live.

And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in
the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and
National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally
consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russell Honore, it was once again
the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a
scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless
government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing
substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our
few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a
Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the
people who run Canada -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New
Orleans showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its
underclass.

This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in
assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and
government support through many other programs. Many have, all their lives,
expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And
the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit
and school buses that could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to
be lost in the flood.

Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or
later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort
of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters
rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one's heart goes out. But
already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their
various entitlements have been directed to new locations.

The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are
yet no statistics, but I'll wager the most generous state in the union will
prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally, contributions
in cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote
Republican. For the world divides into "the mouths" and "the wallets."

The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch
with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers' state of mind.

Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the
United States and you will learn that the U.S. federal government's legal,
constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to
Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.

Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring
a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two
full days in advance of the storm fall. In the little time since, he has
managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation -- the largest in human
history -- without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently
presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious
and childish blame-throwing.

One thinks of Kipling's poem "If," which I learned to recite as a
lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern
leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy -- as anything that is good, beautiful,
or true:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise .

Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by
these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.