Ask Them Why, Barack

The Tribune headline today "Obama blasts Bush administration on Katrina recovery".

New Orleans is emblematic of the failures of the welfare state, so it is fitting that Sen. Barack Obama, who espouses the same kind of dead-end policies, is campaigning there for president. Ah yes, it's always someone else's fault, whether it be an Act of God, or a failed levy.

Louisiana should be paradise on earth, run by Democrats for a century, a place where they had free rein to employ their policies. Instead the whole country saw the disproportionate number of single moms trapped in the city. Contrary to the MSM template, poor whites were more harmed than poor blacks---4 out of the 5 parishes hit by flooding in New Orleans were majority white---in a majority black city. It's a place that's indiscriminately corrupt. The whole country saw entire neighborhoods built in the shadow of levies their own Democrat politicians undermined by corrupt practices, siphoning off money meant for repairs, awarding contracts based on the good old boy network.

You may recall, or you may not, that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans a glancing blow. The main brunt of the storm slammed into the Mississippi Gulf Coast and swept up through the entire state. New Orleans' levies should have held for the level of the storm they incurred. But they didn't, because their construction and maintenance was substandard, betrayed by the same corruption and incompetence that slows New Orleans' recovery. New Orleans has the same mayor who left school buses in their lots, rather than evacuate his needy people. Louisiana has the same governor who wrung her hands and didn't call in the National Guard until days of suffering had passed.

In truth, most of New Orleans should not be rebuilt. After Grand Forks, North Dakota suffered major flooding the city turned low-lying areas into parks, and helped residents resettle. But common sense seems in short supply in New Orleans. The mold-infested Lower 9th ward should be razed as unfit for human habitation. New Orleans has been sinking for years, (cooler colors indicate lower elevations) and the loss of barrier islands has made major reconstruction in many places untenable. Also here. Much of it should be left to regenerate naturally to protect inhabited areas further inland. Safeguards against corruption (WSJ, In Katrina's Wake, 1/27) before doling out major monies are only sensible---why would anyone ever want anything like this to happen again?

And yet Democrat politicians like Sen. Barack Obama would rather posture amid the ruins of New Orleans than repudiate the failed Democrat policies of the past that created it, and move on to workable solutions. Many of New Orleans' inhabitants have left for good, voting with their feet. Rather than making cliched speeches Sen. Obama would do better to ask them why.

UPDATE: Here's The Onion's take on New Orleans.

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