Dowd's Dishonesty

Maureen Dowd tries to kick George Bush in the shins with her most recent column but just winds up looking foolish, petty, and dishonest instead. Her column can be read here. Like much of her work, it's short on facts and long on baseless invective. Let's consider her more serious allegations in the order she makes them.

She alleges that money that could have gone to shoring up the levees around New Orleans has been squandered in Iraq:

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

The implication, of course, is that there were not enough National Guard troops at home to do the job of securing the city. This is, however, completely false. James Robbins sets forth the truth of the matter at National Review Online.

She goes on to imply that the Bush administration is culpable for the deaths of New Orleanians because they cut the Corps of Engineers budget request last year:

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million.

Aside from the delightful irony of seeing lefties like Ms Dowd harrumphing that the Corps of Engineers, a governmental entity absolutely loathed by the Left, did not get the funding it requested, there is another problem here. Let's suppose the Corps had received everything it asked for. Would the money have been spent on levees or on marshland reclamation? If it would have been spent on the levees would they have been upgraded by the time Katrina hit? Would the money have made any real difference by this date? If not, why mention it? Until we know the answers to these questions Dowd's complaint is meaningless.

She goes on to express amazement that Bush doesn't start metaphorically executing people willy-nilly in the wake of the calamity:

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

So far from being a flaw in Bush's character his reluctance to cashier his people reveals a strength. It certainly shows a vast difference between Bush and Dowd. Bush believes in sticking by his subordinates and supporting them until all the facts are in. It's one reason he inspires such fierce loyalty among his staff and cabinet. Dowd, like some Middle-East despot, believes in cutting off peoples' heads as soon as they give the appearance of having screwed up, regardless of what the ultimate facts might turn out to be. It's one reason that so many people find her repellant.

A lot of conservatives think Brown should be fired, too, but the difference between them and Dowd is that they see Bush's willingness to take heat for his people as a virtue and Dowd sees it as a vice. Actually, she sees everything Bush does as a vice.

She then shamelessly insinuates that Bush's people don't care about Katrina's victims because they're just blacks, don't you know.

[I]t is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

A lack of empathy? How does she know what Bush and his staff were feeling and doing behind the scenes. As time goes on it's becoming clearer that much of the fault for the predicament of the people trapped in New Orleans, to the extent it wasn't their own, was the fault of their mayor and their governor. Why does she not condemn their lack of empathy? Might it be that they're Democrats (and minorities) while Bush is a white Republican male, a legitimate object of obloquy in the eyes of northeastern liberals like Dowd?

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

This is the most egregiously dishonest thing she says in the piece. It demonstrates her utter disregard for the truth when a lie will better serve the purpose of slipping the stiletto into Bush's ribs. First, she implies that the administration is racist, but worse, she strongly suggests that the 700 guests of the Hyatt were sent to the front of the line by the feds because the people they were butting ahead of were only poor blacks. What actually happened was this: The people from the Hyatt were tourists who were sent to the head of the line under orders by the black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

It might be worthwhile to ask Ms Dowd why she chooses not to tell her readers who was responsible for greasing the tourists' exit from town. Evidently, when you need to tarnish a man like the president it's okay at the NY Times to deceive your readers any way you can.

That's Howard

How long will rank and file Democrats allow themselves to be led by people who have so few scruples that they'll do something like this:

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has told one of the nation's largest black church groups that racism was a factor in the rising death toll from Hurricane Katrina.

Dean told the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention of America in Miami that the nation must "come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not."

He also said the funds that now support the Iraq war could be used to rebuild New Orleans or to aid the poor and elderly.

The ugly truth is that Howard Dean is a mendacious demagogue who is a disgrace to American politics. If he's going to make the claim that skin color was a factor in determining people's fate in Katrina's aftermath he should at least have the decency to offer some supporting evidence aside from the simple-minded observation that there was a large number of blacks in the Superdome.

Does Mr. Dean have information that people were denied the ability to evacuate because they were black? Were they refused helicopter rescue because they were black? Were they denied access to shelters, food, water, or medical care because they were black? Exactly how did skin color play the role that Mr. Dean alleges? Tell us, Mr. Dean, precisely how were African-Americans singled out for discriminatory treatment?

Of course, he won't answer these questions because demagogues never get down to specifics - it would enable people to see through their scam. Sadly for this country, Dean and others like him in the Democratic party will continue to set one American against another for political advantage as long as they can get away with it.

It's disgusting. It's criminal. It's Howard Dean.

The Calm Before the Storm

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail informs us here and here of preparations for a big battle at Tal Afar, an Iraqi city that has become a haven for insurgents. The coalition is evacuating the citizens in preparation for a massive combat operation along the lines of the assault on Fallujah. Already two hundred insurgents have been killed. The city is cordoned and escape is doubtful. The battle is imminent.

Requesting Your Help

As you know from our announcement at the head of our posts, we've been having trouble with our server not always responding to readers' requests to access it. The problem persists for a few minutes and then seems to miraculously heal itself. Being somewhat skeptical of the doctrine of the infinite extent of God's mercy and doubting that it reaches to healing machines several times a day, we've been trying to pinpoint a more mundane cause.

We'd like to enlist the aid of our readers in the effort. If you have gotten a "web site not responding" message when trying to access Viewpoint anytime within the last four weeks you can help us by going to the Feedback button and telling us whether this has happened once or twice during this period, or if it has happened more frequently.

If the Feedback button doesn't work with your browser feel free to e-mail me at 74@aol.com. Bill and I appreciate your help with this.

Thanks,

RLC

Saving the Beer From the Coelacanths

Years ago scientists dredged up a primitive fish off the coast of Madagascar called a coelacanth that had been believed to have been extinct for millions of years. Such finds are called "living fossils." I thought of the coelacanth when reading an article about Muslims who killed a woman for having a romantic relationship with a Christian and then went on a rampage destroying the homes of Palestinian Christians.

In the standard view, you see, man has evolved through stages of barbarism and savagery culminating in the civilized form he takes today as "thinking man", Homo sapiens. According to this version of human evolution man had to overcome along the way cognitive abilities on the level of an imbecile and religious beliefs that require that the gods be appeased through human sacrifice - the bloodier, more terrifying, the better. Think of the thugees in Raiders of the Lost Ark sacrificing their victim by ripping his still pulsing heart out of his breast.

We've advanced beyond this primitive savagery thanks largely to the influence of Christianity on the Western world, but there are still pockets of "living fossils" found throughout the world which still function cognitively at the level of an imbecile and hold to religious beliefs that cause them to revel in bloody human sacrifice. These people belong to the genus Homo, but they can hardly be considered sapiens. One such very large pocket stretches across the vast Arab world and produces stories like this on an almost daily basis:

Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched.

The incident began on Saturday night and lasted until early Sunday, when Palestinian Authority security forces interfered to disperse the attackers. Residents said several houses were looted and many families were forced to flee to Ramallah and other Christian villages, although no one was injured.

The attack on the village of 1,500 was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir earlier this week. The 30-year-old woman, according to Palestinian Authority security sources, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba.

"When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison," said one source. "Then they buried her without reporting her death to the relevant authorities."

When the PA security forces decided to launch an investigation into the woman's death, her family protested for fear that the relationship would be exposed. The family was further infuriated by the decision to exhume the body for autopsy.

The attack is one of the worst against Christians in the West Bank in many years. Residents said it took the PA security forces several hours to reach Taiba. Others complained that the IDF, which is in charge of overall security in the area, did not answer their desperate calls for immediate help.

"More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night," said a Taiba resident. "They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances."

With the exception of large numbers of PA policemen, the streets of Taiba were completely deserted on Sunday as the residents remained indoors. Many torched cars littered the streets. At least 16 houses had been gutted by fire and the assailants also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.

"It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs," said another resident.

"Some people saw them carrying weapons. They first attacked houses belonging to the Khoury family [looking for the man who had the affair with the women, not realizing he had already fled the village.] Then they went to their relatives. They entered the houses and destroyed everything there. Then they tried to enter the local beer factory, but were repelled by PA security agents. The fire engine arrived five hours later."

Col. Tayseer Mansour, commander of the PA police in the Ramallah area, said his men arrived late because of the need to coordinate their movements with the IDF. "The delay resulted in the torching of a number of houses and cars in the village," he said.

Taiba, the only West Bank village that is completely inhabited by Christians, is famous for its Taiba Beer factory, which was established by the Khoury family in 1994.

The residents are Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic. The village was originally called Ephraim, and is thought to be the city to which Jesus came with his disciples before his crucifixion: "Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went thence unto a country near the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim" (John 11:54).

According to some accounts, Salah a-Din, who led the war against the Crusaders, was responsible for the name change. He is said to have found the villagers there to be nice and kind - in Arabic, taybeen - and the name stuck, to become Taiba.

Well, at least the PA police prevented the destruction of the brewery by the human coelacanths. There's no word yet, however, as to how Allah views this intervention to preserve the iniquitous manufacture of the vile fluid from the expression of his righteous anger. Maybe the police can atone for thwarting Allah's will by permitting the murder of a few more women and/or Christians. That will likely satisfy his wrath.

A closing question for the moral equivalence crowd: When was the last time you read about Israelis doing anything like this?

The World Begins to Step Forward

This is good to read although given the wealth of some of these countries one hopes that this it just a first step:

CAIRO, Egypt - Donations to Hurricane Katrina relief poured in from around the world Sunday, with Kuwait offering $500 million and other Mideast countries offering aid and condolences despite widespread opposition to U.S. policies in the area.

The European Union and NATO also stepped up to provide aid following rare requests for help from Washington, while the 22-member Arab League urged countries across the Middle East to "extend aid to the United States to face the exceptional humane circumstances."

Spain, Belgium, Britain, Germany and Italy announced they had started or were about to send aid and experts to the U.S. to help with the logistical operation of getting help to hurricane survivors. Britain's Ministry of Defense said Sunday the government would send 500,000 ration packs. Germany and Italy sent flights of supplies, including food rations, bed supplies, inflatable dinghies and water purifiers.

The $500 million offer by Kuwait - which owes its 1991 liberation from seven months of occupation by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army to a U.S.-led coalition - is the largest to date, surpassing the $100 million pledged by Qatar, another U.S. ally in the Mideast. "It's our duty as Kuwaitis to stand by our friends to lighten the humanitarian misery and as a pay back for the many situations during which Washington helped us through," Kuwait's energy minister, Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said in a statement.

Kuwait's offer includes $400 million in oil products and $100 million in humanitarian relief, Al Sabah's spokesman told The Associated Press. Another close U.S. ally, the United Arab Emirates, is sending tents, clothing, food and other aid. The United States enjoys close relations with most Gulf states, particularly Kuwait, which was a launch pad for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam, and Qatar, a base for the U.S. military in the war's initial stages.

Bitter U.S. foes Iran and North Korea - which Washington pressured over their respective nuclear programs - offered to help rescue efforts, and Syria - another longtime opponent - was among numerous Middle Eastern states offering condolences. And Arab League chief Amr Moussa said the Arab world should support the United States, which "always expresses solidarity with nations that face natural catastrophes and extends most of the aid they receive."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a longtime opponent of the Bush administration, said Sunday he had offered 1 million barrels of gasoline and $5 million, but criticized the U.S. government for failing to evacuate the victims before disaster struck. "The rich were able to leave, by their own means. It was the poor that remained there," the leftist leader said on his weekly television and radio show. The United Nations said Sunday the U.S. had accepted its offer of U.N. assistance and expertise.

"A small U.N. coordination team is in Washington now consulting with government officials on how best the U.N. can complement the United States' own emergency efforts," said a statement from the U.N. spokesman. The Paris-based International Energy Agency has also said its 26-member nations would release the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves.

These offers of aid should not be turned away, even if we don't need them. To spurn the offer of a gift is to encourage resentments. To accept the gift is to make the giver feel good, not only about himself but about the one upon whom the gift is bestowed. Acts of kindness generate kind feelings in the doer. Feelings follow actions. When people or nations act in kind ways they find themselves experiencing much more positive feelings toward the object of their beneficence than perhaps they did before. We should encourage all the acts of kindness toward the U.S. that others wish to bestow.

Dwarf-Tossing

PowerLine does a complete smackdown of the NY Times' Paul Krugman who looks more intellectually diminutive every time he writes a column. In his latest he takes a potshot at the administration for its alleged tardiness in the wake of Katrina by citing the example of the U.S.S. Bataan:

The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn't deliver.

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good.

Bad choice of stories to employ against Mr. Bush, this one. As it turns out, a simple check of the facts would have shown Mr. Krugman that he was embarking down the road to personal embarrassment by building his case upon this story, but checking facts is for right-wingers. Lefties are unconstrained by such bourgeois and infra dig considerations. Read PowerLine to find out what has really happened with the U.S.S. Bataan.

PowerLine is going to have to start picking fights with people its own size. Picking one with Krugman is analogous to dwarf-tossing.

The Thuggery Was Predictable

Here's a question I've had ever since the frenetic stories of media reporters stationed at the Superdome and the Convention Center started coming in about the desperate state of people who were being victimized by thugs and rapists: Was the crime rate at these places significantly different than it is in New Orleans under normal conditions? Probably not, I thought.

Now City Journal writer Nicole Gelinas comes to a similar conclusion. She rejects Al Sharpton's feeble apologias on behalf of the looters in N.O. and proceeds to dissect the problem and apportions blame where it belongs. Her article, written before the military moved in to establish order, makes a lot of sense.

New Orleans' vicious looters aren't the real face of the city's poor-their victims are.

New Orleans hasn't even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that "looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them." The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didn't come.

In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperate-and it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.

Let's go back to last Sunday morning-such a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with means-the most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluent-left the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.

Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good day-impoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones-those who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped-starved and dying of dehydration.

And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day-and have now taken over the stricken city. What's happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can't control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.

Katrina didn't turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week's looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans' murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders-compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans' intractable crime problem, but it's necessary, since it explains how this week's communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.

During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans-and the state judicial system-has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.

New Orleans, first off, doesn't have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs-crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.

In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren't arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.

On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans' dangerous criminal class-yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now-terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines-the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans' black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: "Thou shalt not kill." The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city-young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.

This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets-and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.

But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they're mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren't the face of New Orleans' poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm-but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.

This week's looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week's looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans' officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims-according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They've hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they've likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they've smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn't destroy their homes and their livelihoods-fellow citizens did.

Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans-and to America.

Even in the best of times Mayor Nagin ran a dysfunctional city. For him and others to blame the feds for not responding more quickly to the crisis largely created by their own lack of preparedness, seems like an act of deflecting fault that they know is their own.

Anyway, the good news is that once the cops got some reinforcements from the national guard they found a bunch of these hoodlums and terminated their activities, as well as the hoodlums themselves, in rather definitive fashion. There are reports that at least eight of these morons are permanently out of the terrorizing business.

We're waiting for the caterwauling howls of protest from the ACLU against police brutality to begin.

Why Are They Poor?

Most of us watch the nightly news reports from the Gulf Coast and see people, human beings, in desperate straits, but not so some of our friends on the left. They look at the footage and they see proof of white racism and oppression. They are unable to view the world except through the neo-Marxist lens of race and class.

Jack Shafer at Slate writes a somewhat confused essay about the fact that news journalists seem very reluctant to mention the race and class of the victims of the Hurricane and also of those who have exploited this calamity to rob and pillage.

Like a social bloodhound Shafer thinks himself to have caught the scent of racism in these scenes of human suffering and devastation, and he bays and sniffs avidly along the trail in avid pursuit of his quarry.

Unfortunately, he just seems to get himself tangled up in his argument, as if the source of the scent had run around in circles and then off in several different directions at once. You can read it for yourself. The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs Shafer starts us down only to turn us around and set us off in another direction when it becomes apparent that there's no prey to be found where we were almost wear us out. It's hard to tell exactly what his point is until we get to the closing paragraph which might serve as a synedoche for the whole:

By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians-and perhaps black Mississippians-suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they're racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population.

It could be interpreted as racist, he admits, to make an issue of the color of the people who didn't evacuate and who looted stores, but it's evidently also racist to ignore these pertinent facts because we'd be papering over the salient point that these are black people who've been disenfranchised and victimized by a racist society that allows, even compels, these wretches to live in poverty. One almost expects Shafer to point to Katrina's furious white clouds as proof that the whole tragic disaster was a racist plot by evil white meteorologists at the National Weather Service, Bush appointees, no doubt, to make poor black folk suffer.

His final line is: "What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, 'Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?' "

Well, he's not asking us, but if he were, here's the answer we'd give him, though I'm fairly sure he wouldn't like it:

The reasons blacks in New Orleans, like blacks elsewhere in America, are often poor is because large swatches of the African-American population have, for various reasons, abandoned, or never embraced, the set of values that enable people to become upwardly mobile in our society. What are these values? Here are two which are conspicuously and tragically absent in many African-American neighborhoods:

Getting married before you have kids and staying married afterward. Nothing is more likely to guarantee that children grow up poor than to have them raised by a young mother with no husband. Such children are not only very likely to be impoverished, they are also more likely to be socially dysfunctional, i.e. involved with drugs, crime and early sex, than those who grow up with their biological father. The revolution in attitudes which resulted in single motherhood becoming an accepted and acceptable condition has been hard on the white population, but it has been devastating to African-Americans. Twenty eight percent of white children are born to unmarried mothers, but almost sixty nine percent of black children are born out of wedlock. This is an anchor around the necks of black kids which prevents them from climbing out of their penury and reaching higher socio-economic heights.

Valuing education. African-Americans too often fail to place the premium on education that other groups do. Black parents, for whatever reasons, tend to be less involved in their children's schools, they tend to read to them less, and to offer their children fewer enrichment activities outside of school. Critics sometimes say that inner city schools are in such a deplorable state that kids can't learn in them, but one reason they're in such bad repair is that too few parents of black kids simply care enough about their schools to demand that they be maintained, supplied, and hold to high standards of discipline.

Black kids too often suffer verbal and even physical abuse if they outperform their peers and are seen as "acting white." Young blacks are often encouraged by a depauperate culture to project images of black stupidity. Schools are charged with racism by the race hustlers if they try to teach black kids to be articulate or force them to dress in a manner that doesn't make them look like morons, with their pants at half-mast and their hats turned sideways. The peer culture in which they swim too often encourages them to emulate some "gangsta rapper" rather than a Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas or Condaleeza Rice, people who are often held in contempt by black "leaders" as Uncle Toms and sell-outs.

Children who go through school and never learn to speak articulately, to read effectively, and to do basic math are doomed. As bad as our urban schools may be, a child with a concerned family to go home to could still develop these basic skills in them. Too many African-American children don't, because they don't return to a home where learning is valued.

If Jack Shafer wants to know why there is an African-American underclass, that's the answer. Those who are chronically poor and who pass on their poverty from generation to generation place a low value on both marriage and education. So far from this being the result of a racist plot, it is much more likely to be the consequence of the disintegration of both sexual mores and academic standards that liberals applauded in the 1970s and which still plagues us today.

Just like Katrina, the liberalization of social attitudes has hit and hurt everyone, but they have hit African-Americans the hardest. If we sincerely care about ameliorating poverty in this country then we need to realize that nothing we do will have any lasting effect, and may even make the problem worse, as some forms of welfare did in the 1970s, unless we change people's attitudes about the crucial importance of marriage and education.

One Reason to Rebuild

To the Salafi Jihadis throughout the world the deaths of over a thousand Shia during a stampede in Baghdad and the almost simultaneous destruction in America caused by Katrina is an omen that Allah is on the march against apostates and infidels. According to Walid Phares these twin tragedies are boosting jihadi confidence and spirits.

I had my doubts about the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans, but having read the Islamo-fascist reaction to this calamity I've come to think that, even were there no other good reason to restore the city, it should be done anyway just to show the Wahhabists that Allah is not in the business of killing Muslim women and children and poor old folks in America just to facilitate their warped, perverted hopes for a world groaning under the stifling demands of Islamic law.

Rebuilding the city will show these nut cakes that their Allah smiles upon mercy, compassion and kindness, and holds out no blessing for those who promote hatred, ignorance, and murder. The lesson will be lost on most of them, probably, but maybe a few will be able to discern the message.

The Grand Unifying Theory

One frequently hears it said that evolution undergirds and unifies all of modern biology which would be devastated were evolution to be somehow disproved. Evolutionary theory, the thinking goes, is the sine qua non of biology.

Such claims, however, have recently come under fire. They're being criticized as at best overblown and at worst completely false. Consider, for instance, this article in The Scientist by Philip Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Skell writes:

...the modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.1 "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self- centered and aggressive - except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed - except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.

Darwinian evolution - whatever its other virtues - does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.

Some writers have been so carried away in their enthusiasm for the neo-Darwinian synthesis that they've asserted it to be not only central to biology but to all of science. That always seemed to me to be a whopper of an exaggeration. In light of Skell's essay it seems not only hyperbolic but risible.

Does God Punish the Innocent?

I don't often agree with Juan Cole but its hard to argue with him on this one. There were, apparently, some who had made the claim that Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans for its decadence. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, huge swaths of populated land across the Gulf coast were devastated yet the most decadent section of the city of New Orleans was largely unscathed. So what conclusion is to be drawn from that? Cole says it leaves us with three alternatives:

1. God does not exist. Or:

2. God does not use natural or man-made catastrophes to punish people for moral failings. Or:

3. God does not actually object to people having a good time occasionally.

With appropriate qualifications we'll take options two and three, thanks.

Cole also posts a transcript of the conversation between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson after 9/11 in which they interpret the huge loss of life as God's judgment on America for its secularism. The biggest flaw in their argument, of course, is that none of the groups which they accuse of having precipitated God's wrath were harmed on 9/11. The people who died were salt of the earth types, many of whom were Christians.

And who suffered from the tsunami last December? It wasn't the people who Falwell and Robertson would think deserve it: wealthy, hedonistic tourists and others. It was innocent, poor children, mostly.

Make no mistake, I agree with Falwell and Robertson in their claim that the ACLU, NARAL, PAW, etc. have done great harm to the social fabric of this nation. But to state that God sends babes in arms and their poor mothers into the raging torrent because of the sins of such organizations as these entails a concept of God more compatible with Islam than Christianity. The God of Christianity doesn't kill the innocent in order to punish the guilty.

Malkin Calls For FEMA Head to be Fired

New Orleans has been largely evacuated and the long hard job of finding housing, jobs, and schools for the evacuees is ahead of us. Michelle Malkin insists that we don't want the same people handling that work who bungled the immediate storm aftermath. She singles out Michael Brown as one man who shouldn't be in the position he's in and says why.

Brown as head of FEMA certainly has a lot of questions to answer, and we don't want to pass a judgment until more of those answers come in. Likewise, with Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and Governor Blanco of Louisiana. They may turn out to have done as well as could be expected given the circumstances, but their performance raises questions and needs to be scrutinized.

Much more important than fixing blame, however, is that we learn the lessons of this calamity. Without wishing to sound perverse, Katrina may have done us a favor if it forced us to address weaknesses in our emergency preparedness. We know that Muslim terrorists are trying to find a way to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major city. Should they succeed, God forbid, the lessons we learn from this hurricane will be essential to responding to that disaster.

Let's hope that state and city governments across this nation have called for meetings all next week to begin the process of reviewing, assessing, and improving their plans for dealing with devastating catastrophes in their jurisdictions.

Rehnquist's Passing Occasions Liberal Glee

In the wake of Justice Rehnquist's passing much will be written about who his successor will be. Meanwhile, though, the folks at Democratic Underground can scarcely contain their joy that this great and good man is dead.

For those who have the stomach for it here and here can be seen the hideous face of many of the rank and file liberal activists in the Democratic party. Read it and weep for how ugly we've become.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the tip.

Stages of Grief

William Dembski traces the steps of a scientific revolution and finds them very much the same as the stages of grief. When a person is suddenly beset by tragedy he first goes through a time of denial followed by anger, then bargaining with God, depression and, finally, resignation.

We are witnessing such a transition today in the contest between ID and materialistic Darwinism, and the materialists are deep into the anger stage. Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote that a revolution is rarely completed by the older generation of scientists. They have devoted too much of their lives and reputations to the old theory to give it up. Like Kuhn, Dembski believes that the final stage will never be reached by the present generation of materialists but will be left to a younger cadre of thinkers who are not so heavily invested in the materialism of their predecessors.

It's an interesting read.

On Playing Politics With Tragedy

My friend Byron Borger, who is diligent in calling me to account whenever he thinks I need it (which is frequently), has a response to my recent post about how many of president Bush's critics are using the calamity in New Orleans to score political points. Byron's criticism can be found by clicking on the Feedback button.

My reply is here:

By,

You said in your e-mail that:

...you should have some shame about violating your usual high regard for honesty. To put it bluntly, you do not know what drives, purely, the motives of anyone who has blamed the current Administration for inadequate policies and action. How do you know that such concerns are to gain "political advantage."?? I think this is a hunch on your part, and not all "provable" let alone related to "objective facts on the ground" (whatever that means.)*

Why not just say that you disagree with those who tend to think that policies to cut funding have been wrong, that failure to send help promptly has been a mistake. You can say that. But to ascribe the worst of partisan motives to those believe these things, and to say that their deeply held convictions are shameful just doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Why do you presume something corrupt, or insincere, as if critics don't really care about this huge human suffering, but only want to sound off against Bush?

The media and the Dems and even some Republicans are faulting the administration for the apparent delay in getting order restored to the city. The charge seems to me to be premature, excessive, and focussed on Bush rather than FEMA and thus suspicious. Fair-minded people would be more hesitant to point fingers until the facts are in as to why it took five days to get the National Guard into the city. Questions need to be answered like whose task is it to do disaster planning? How adequate were the plans that were in place and how well executed were they? Whose decision is it to request troops? The federal response was slow compared to what? How easy is it to get troops federalized, mobilized and sent into a flood zone? That people are so quick to assume that it's all Bush's responsibility and to fault him without knowing the answers to any of these questions is more than just unwise. It suggests that there are political motives behind the charges. Imagine that Clinton were still president and the same events unfolded. Do you think these same people would have been as critical of him? I don't.

Bush has been accused of everything from dawdling at the ranch (Mayor Nagin) to racism (Rep.Elijah Cummings), to lacking the manpower to handle the crisis because he has it foolishly tied up in Iraq (Al Sharpton), and yet no one knows at this point where the breakdowns in the chain of responsibility occured or why. Would these people have said these kinds of things about Clinton? I honestly don't think any of them would, and if I'm right, then to say them about Bush suggests a purely partisan intent and a disregard for any knowledge of relevant facts.

You're right that I can't prove that conclusion in a legal sense, but it's more than just a hunch.

Bush has been accused of having failed to grant the Army Corps of Engineers the amount of money they requested to upgrade the levees as if this is proof of his culpability(see here, for example). This criticism has been made by leftists who generally disdain the corps of engineers for their environmental depradations and would be happy to see them disappear altogether. Doesn't that strike you as a little odd? Doesn't it seem irresponsible to just accept the charge at face value without asking why the funds were denied? Should we just give the corps whatever money it asks for whenever it asks for it? Even if their budgets had been approved why should we think that the work would have been completed by now? It sometimes takes years just to get such projects planned out and moving. In short, was the decision to shave the corps' funding request understandable and was the difference between the amount requested and the amount actually granted really a factor in the failure of the levees after Katrina? How can anyone start pointing fingers until these questions are answered unless they're just trying to score cheap political points?

Consider your own words in a paragraph from your e-mail:

I am not sure if you meant that as a jab, but his [Mayor Nagin's] comments in this story didn't strike me as excessive. Not sure about that picture. Wonder why he couldn't get to them? Maybe they were surrounded by deeper water. Maybe he couldn't get them across one of the bridges. Maybe the roads were so jammed with outgoing evacuees that it would have been unhelpful to drive the buses away, only to find out you needed to get them back. (It seems, although I don't know what happened 24 hours before) that they still hoped against hope and didn't act decisively themselves until it was too late. I suppose they didn't count on that levee breaking. Anyway, I just don't know what the bus picture comment was to imply, but again it seems unfair.

You try here to give Mayor Nagin every benefit of the doubt, as well you should, but I think that that same fair-mindedness should be extended also to governor Blanco and the president. I have heard very little criticism of Nagin or Blanco, both democrats, but it's been heaped on Bush and Mississippi governor Haley Barbor (both Republicans). Why? Might there not have been reasons why Bush's response, like Nagin's, was not as quick as some think it should have been? Why should Bush's critics not be expected to give him the same benefit of the doubt as you give Nagin? That Bush is denied that benefit suggests to me that a significant number of his critics see a political opportunity to discredit him in this calamity and they don't want to pass it up.

You write that:

Anybody anywhere who criticizes the President, it seems, you insist are hateful, shameful and with nefarious motives.

This is untrue and unfair. I have myself criticized the president in Viewpoint on a number of occasions and have cited the criticisms of others with which I disagreed, but which I thought were done respectfully and sincerely. All I ask from his opponents is the same fairness you ask for Mayor Nagin. If they don't give it then I have to ask why not. If that means impugning their motives then maybe they need to be impugned.

Parenthetically, I want to add that your words above (to ascribe the worst of partisan motives to those believe these things, and to say that their deeply held convictions are shameful just doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Why do you presume something corrupt, or insincere, as if critics don't really care about this huge human suffering, but only want to sound off against Bush?) are irrelevant to my post. I didn't criticize anyone for holding views about the role of government similar to your own. I criticized people for throwing around contemptible allegations without having yet any understanding of what happened. I criticized them for being unwilling to extend the same fairness to Republicans that would be, and is, granted by them to Democrats. I criticized them for crass political opportunism in the wake of tragedy.

Decent observers who hold views like yours are not taking advantage of the emotions and suffering of those trapped and victimized by Katrina to play the blame game and to call Bush incompetent and racist. If the facts warrant it later then that will be different. As of now, however, decent people should, and will, withhold judgment on where the fault lies.

Unfortunately, the people we're hearing most from on the left are too often like the person you mentioned from Air America:

"The Anchoress" who quoted an Air America person who said that Bush may enjoy seeing poor people of blue states suffer and therefore won't rescue them. I don't know how, but I will reply to that.

You might include in your reply that the individual who made that statement ought to get his/her facts right before sounding off so that he/she doesn't appear so dumb. Louisiana is a red state. It voted for Bush.

Best,

Dick

Dennett's Sub-Optimal Argument

Darwinian atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University offers up an editorial in last Sunday's New York Times in which he probably says more than some of his anti-ID allies would have liked.

For instance, one of the claims we hear from evolutionists in the battle over the teaching of ID is that there's no reason why one can't be both an evolutionist as well as a religious believer. Darwinism is not hostile to theism, we are assured, but then Dennett lets the cat out of the bag:

[N]atural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God.

True, you can still believe in God and accept evolution, Dennett informs us, but your belief in God is plainly irrational. In other words, he suggests, Darwinism renders the existence of God highly implausible and unlikely.

In his column, the Tufts philosopher accuses Intelligent Design advocates of perpetrating an "ingenious hoax" which accusation is, of course, a slander. It entails that ID scientists and philosophers know full well that intelligence was not at work in the development of life, but nonetheless deliberately deceived, and continue to deliberately deceive, the gullible masses into believing it was. This is to impute reprehensible behavior and motives to people in the ID camp, and unless Dennett can back his allegation up with some justification he ought to apologize. His reckless and insulting charge is reminiscient of Richard Dawkins' asinine claim that anyone who denies evolution is either "ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked-but I'd rather not consider that)."

Amusingly, having called ID a hoax, Dennett implies that the assurance we have of the truth of the Darwinian doctrine that natural processes are sufficient by themselves to account for the emergence of all living things is comparable to the assurance we have of the truth of both quantum physics and relativity theory.

Both quantum physics and relativity theory have been tested and confirmed many times. When has the claim that mechanistic forces are adequate by themselves to create biological information ever been tested, much less confirmed? How could it even be tested? Dennett's doctrine is a piece of metaphysical speculation, not science and his claim that it enjoys the same degree of confirmation as the theories of physics is risible.

Dennett also finds himself unable to talk about biological structures and processes without resorting to the vocabulary of purpose and intelligence that he disdains, which is an interesting admission in itself. He sprinkles his essay with terms and phrases like:

"the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs"; "Brilliant as the design of the eye is"; "the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive"; "Evolution is cleverer than you are"; "When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection"; "The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant", etc.

Dennett would deny any telic intent in these phrases, of course, but the fact remains that brilliance and cleverness are attributes of minds, not purposeless forces. That he feels constrained to use those words to describe biological phenomena does not help him make the case that these phenomena were not intentionally designed by an intelligent mind.

He completely misses the point when he writes that:

Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

Surely Professor Dennett doesn't think that ID needs to explain how structures like the bacterial flagellum were designed. A tourist need not have any idea how Mt. Rushmore came into existence in order to conclude that it is the product of intelligent agency. A detective need not have any idea how a crime was committed in order to know that it was an intentional act and not an accident. The role of ID is not to explain, but to identify, intelligent purpose in biological structures.

Nor do ID'ers argue that because evolutionists haven't explained everything yet that therefore ID is true. They argue that some things haven't been explained in terms of purely natural mechanism because any such explanation that could be offered is so improbable and implausible as to render it literally incredible. They argue that it is only an apriori commitment to material explanations that prevents researchers from admitting that biological sytems and structures certainly appear to bear the impress of intelligent input in their manufacture.

Finally, in his quest to strike a fatal blow to ID he stumbles over a few hoary myths left over from the 1950s. He claims for example that:

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

Well, no. Michael Denton lays out the physiological rationale for the wiring of the eye's nervous system in a 1999 article that can be found here. It turns out that the eye's neural wiring itself manifests an extraordinary bit of engineering and design. Dennett will have to come up with another "accident" if he's going to use sub-optimal designs as an argument against ID.

Dennett's editorial may be compelling to those readers who may be eager to be persuaded, but as a piece of convincing argumentation it's pretty lame. It suffers itself from an intellectual sub-optimality analogous to the "accidents" he cites against the existence of an intelligent designer. There's much additional criticism of Dennett's essay here.

Playing Politics With Tragedy

PowerLine is one good place to go for sanity in the midst of the criticism of the federal government for a seemingly slow response to the needs of the hurricane victims. Whatever blame is merited for the problems being experienced there must be shouldered by the local and state government whose responsibility it is to provide the planning and resources for the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The attempt to blame Bush for the delay in the delivery of rescue, security, food and shelter is driven not by any objective facts on the ground but purely by the desire to gain political advantage. It's shameful.

Yahoo has a photo of a school bus parking lot filled with school buses up to their axles in water. While New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin rants about the need for buses to move people and the lack of state and federal help these school buses were sitting in the lot since before the storm.

Michelle Malkin also has some good stuff on events in the Gulf region.

Anyone who would like to contribute to the recovery effort can do so at the Red Cross site here.

Not Playing Fair

Perhaps it is becuse Jim Glassman is a white, middle-aged male that he seems to have an inordinate affinity for basing conclusions on facts rather than feelings. This is not a welcome trait among post-modern ideologues, and no doubt many such will be thrown into a snarl by this essay by Glassman at Tech Central Station. In it Glassman unfashionably and unconscionably introduces a few scientific facts into the debate among lefties over whether Katrina was the result mostly of purely natural geophysical forces with some input by George Bush, or whether it can be, as many on the left suspect, laid entirely at the feet of Bush and his anti-environmental cronies. The facts adduced by Glassman make the enviro-loonies look even more looney than usual.

He writes:

...the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now. (Emphasis mine)

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which [Haley] Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflict on his country and the world's economy."

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."

He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing carbon dioxide to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

"Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'"

An article on TCS quoted Gray last year as saying that, while some groups and individuals say that hurricane activity lately "may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,...there is no reasonable scientific way that such an interpretation...can be made."

Indeed, there is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: "Reliable data...since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased."

Yes, decreased.

Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.).

But environmental extremists do not want to be bothered with the facts. Nor do they wish to mourn the destruction and death wreaked on a glorious city. To their everlasting shame, they would rather distort and exploit.

This really is a cheap polemical trick by Glassman to insert a few discordant facts into the left's otherwise highly satisfying argument: Katrina was caused by global warming, global warming is caused by American intransigence on Kyoto, America is lead by Bush. Ergo, Bush caused Katrina and should be impeached this very afternoon!

As a footnote to the left's wild suppositions and misunderstandings about the effects of global warming, Chris Matthews on Wednesday night actually suggested that it was the cause of the Indian Ocean tsunami last December. NBC science advisor, Robert Bazell, had to explain to him that the tsunami was a result of an undersea earthquake and totally unrelated to atmospheric temperatures. To his credit, Matthews seemed to comprehend, somewhat, the irrelevance of a degree or two rise in global temperature to the periodic slippage of the earth's crustal plates and was content to let the matter drop.

Muslim Gratitude

Here's another grateful Muslim whose fat the United States pulled out of the fire in '91, but whose memory is so short and whose gratitude so scant that he rejoices in the havoc Katrina has wrought. After we delivered his country (Kuwait) from Saddam's savage invasion and restored that country's independence we get this from one of its officials.

"Oh honored gentlemen, I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year... and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

"But before I went to sleep, I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R'ad ['The Thunder' chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: 'The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.' [Koran 13:31]."

Evidently, Muslims aren't big on "thank yous."

I wonder if this means that there'll be no economic aid from Kuwait to help defray the cost of recovery from Katrina. And we were expecting boodles of it to be offered by all those Islamic countries we've helped in the last couple of decades, too.

Someone ought to do a study of the difference between Christian benevolence to Muslims around the world, and Muslim benevolence to Christians in need. I'm sure they'd find a rough parity.

Or maybe not.