Skipper wrote:
interesting to hear from outside the USA...

This from the Canadian Press, which apparently, is a bit more objective
than our own press and politicians.
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...not a Harry or a
Chucky, but a real man.

--
Skipper

Don't you think that was an awfully elaborate buildup for one of your
signature attack posts, Psuedo?

Please have the decency to label your drivel OT.