Pruden on Race, Leadership

Wesley Pruden writes an excellent editorial that makes good points about both the quality of leadership shown by local authorities after the hurricane and the orgy of race-baiting that began this weekend.

On the first, he echoes and fleshes out an impression I had and expressed in a comment over at Riding Sun the other day.

Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a "mandatory" evacuation a day late, but kept the city's 2,000 school buses parked [bold added] and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water. Then the governor, Kathleen Blanco, resisted early pleas to declare martial law, and her dithering opened the way for looters, rapists and killers to make New Orleans an unholy hell. Gov. Haley Barbour did not hesitate in neighboring Mississippi, and looters, rapists and killers have not turned the streets of Gulfport and Biloxi into killing fields.

...

Sen. Mary Landrieu, who seems to think she's cute when she's mad [and has an irritating tic at the corner of her mouth --ed], even threatened on national television to punch out the president [bold added] -- a felony, by the way, even as a threat. Mayor Nagin, who you might think would be looking for a place to hide, and Gov. Blanco, nursing a bigtime snit, can't find the right word of thanks to a nation pouring out its heart and emptying its pockets. Maybe the senator should consider punching out the governor, only a misdemeanor.

And then on the race-baiting, which I've blogged about quite a bit here (along with a mention of Nagin's reluctance to use school buses in the evacuation)

The race hustlers waited for three days to inflame a tense situation, but then set to work with their usual dedication. The Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, our self-appointed twin ambassadors of ill will, made the scene as soon as they could, taking up the coded cry that Katrina was the work of white folks, that a shortage of white looters and snipers made looting and sniping look like black crime, that calling the refugees "refugees" was an act of linguistic racism. A "civil rights activist" on Arianna Huffington's celebrity blog even floated the rumor that the starving folks abandoned in New Orleans had been forced to eat their dead -- after only four days. New Orleans has a reputation for its unusual cuisine, but this tale was so tall that nobody paid it much attention. Neither did anyone tell the tale-bearer to put a dirty sock in it.

...

The first polls, no surprise, show the libels are not working. A Washington Post-ABC survey found that the president is not seen as the villain the nutcake left is trying to make him out to be. Americans, skeptical as ever, are believing their own eyes.

If we're lucky enough to salvage something positive from this horrific tragedy, perhaps it will be that the "civil rights" movement, no longer fighting the good fight, will lose its remaining credibility in Katrina's wake just as multiculturalism lost credibility after the London subway bombings. The rantings of Jackson et al. will draw attention to the movement, and then perhaps the cold light of reason will show how this movement, in addition to distracting from the recovery effort, exacerbated the tragedy in the first place. It's not the slam dunk against the loony left that London was, but there is some hope.

-- CAV