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Canadian Press On Bush
A bit more objectivity than we get from our own press and politicians.
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
Canadais 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.
GulfCoasthas 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,
Then you are a man, my son. "
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.
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