I’m old enough to recall the condemnation of the national government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Bush administration received the most of the criticism, particularly when the major media lashed out at the president for not intervening more quickly to save the area’s damage.
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Of course, there was a racist aspect to the criticism, as many of the Katrina victims were dark, and Bush was a Republican. The Sunday after the storms, Nancy Giles said on CBS This Morning:
Rev. Rev. Jesse Jackson said:” Some black people feel that their competition, their house problems, and their voting designs have been a component in the answer”. He continued:” I’m not saying that myself”.
Therefore I’ll claim it.
If white people made up the majority of the hardest hit New Orleans survivors of Hurricane Katrina, they would have had to go days without food and water, forcing many to flee just for safety.
Their bodies would n’t had remained floating in the flimsy water.
They would have been saved and relocated much more quickly than this. Period.
Former Atlanta mayor and UN ambassador Andrew Young said for the New York Times,” I think the simple answer is to say that these are poor people and black people and the government does n’t give a damn,” and he added that” there might be some truth to that.”
Two-thirds of those polled immediately after the storm said they thought the answer would have been quicker if the majority of the victims had been white. Nearly as many people claimed that they did n’t care about the federal government. Nearly all of the survey respondents were dark.
Fast-forward 19 times, and we have a near-reverse position: Hurricane Helene devastated regions of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Conservative voters are overwhelmingly the hardest hit for Helene, and the extreme Biden-Harris management has gotten in the way. Helene ravaged the Southeast on Sept. 26 and 27. FEMA waited another two weeks to challenge an incident pronouncement, and Gov. Cain was raised by Republican Senator Richard Kemp (R-Ga. ) in order for the state to add more Peach State counties to the declaration’s initial fafforeign.
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Connected: Officials Are Hindering Rescue Efforts in North Carolina, and One Rescuer Has Had Enough
The leadership did n’t install Fort Bragg’s 82nd Airborne until Oct. 2— nearly a fortnight after Helene devastated the area. It took three more time to summon additional resources for search and rescue. We wo n’t ever see the current administration receiving the same treatment Bush did after Katrina because of this bureaucratic foot-dragging of the highest order.
Erick Erickson made the point in a row he published on Monday:
The New York Times, five time removed from Katrina, was giving extensive coverage of what it assumed were George W. Bush’s problems. The perpetrators were overwhelmingly dark, and the officers were white.
In North Carolina, the patients are generally white. The pace has subsided. The New York Times returned to January 6th policy by using theories and lies as an justification for the claim that everything is fine.
Many of the stress and bottlenecking of the answer are the result of the efforts of so many people. Human rescue organizations are responding to the calls for supplies in such a large number that they are crowding the airport.
Erickson does, however, mention:
Administrators are not breaking the law in the event of an emergency. The specialist government relies on their best judgment, and local people who are knowledgeable about the area are being prevented from rescuing the stranded and dying.
Military search and rescue unnecessarily delayed entering, and qualified private operators who were already working were pushed out again in.
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Of course, we wo n’t hear about any of this in the media. No one will inquire North Carolinians, Floridians, or Georgians if there’s any cultural or social element to the president’s reaction. After a few more days, the networks wo n’t continue to air the heartrending tales of the people in these regions (unless the stories make Republicans look bad ).
No, we wo n’t see the media criticize Joe Biden or Kamala Harris for the federal government’s response to Helene or Milton in the same way the left did for Katrina. Calling this administration up is up to all of us, including traditional advertising, social media users, and people of all stripes.