US media hails martial law general in New Orleans

[Karmadillo]

Well, since Bush as Churchill hasn't quite worked out, maybe Honore as Napoleon is the way to go. Anything to keep power in responsible, wealthy hands and away from the stinky masses.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hon-s13.shtml

The abject failure of American capitalist society in face of the human tragedy in New Orleans, and the disaster’s exposure of the stark social polarization in the US, have proven deeply unsettling for the ruling elite and the more comfortable sections of the upper middle class.

In search of reassurance, the media has latched onto an unlikely hero—the US Army general who is overseeing what amounts to martial law in New Orleans, directing thousands of heavily armed troops in this largely deserted American city littered with floating corpses.

The media is systematically promoting Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. He is portrayed as the antidote to the miserable incompetence and negligence exhibited by every level of government in the first four days following the hurricane, when the poor, the elderly, the sick and infant children were left literally to die in the streets without aid.

Honore was first hailed by New Orleans’ Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin as “one John Wayne dude,” a characterization that the television networks, followed by the print media, gleefully echoed. Now he is the subject of lengthy panegyrics in the press, extolled as the city’s savior. Among the sickest and most fawning of these tributes was a piece published Monday in the “Style” section of the Washington Post.

“There’s the swagger, and that ever-present stogie,” it reads. “There’s the height and heft of his physique. And that barking voice with its font of perhaps impolitic obscenities... not to mention his penchant for not suffering fools, as is the prerogative of a three-star general.”

more...

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. I believe Gen Honore is one of the good guys

Bush had nothing to do with putting him and the National Guard in charge down there. Bush was trying to get Blanco to Federalize the response and if she had, New Orleans would look more like Fallujah and the Pentagon would still be running a military operation down there.

Honore and the LA National Guard took over the response. The General has the power to bring in forces from anywhere he pleases. As soon as he got to NO he told the troops already there, put down your guns and do something. From that point on the military operation was over and the Rescue/Relief effort was allowed to begin.

[Karmadillo]

2. The article is more interested in the use the corporate media makes

of the military response to the disaster in NO. Instead of focusing on the looting of the government by the wealthy and the parallel efforts to make the government far less effective, it focuses on the military as the answer to chaos. Instead of acountability, we're encourged to seek simplistic, anti-democratic solutions.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/hon-s13.shtml

The content of these articles is both ridiculous and ominous. It would seem that those who seek to shape public opinion in America are promoting the idea that the country’s immense problems—and its “hunger for a leader”—may be answered by the rise of a military man on horseback.

There is an objective basis and a profound political logic behind such conceptions. The “vulnerability to disasters” of which the AP speaks is the product of more than a quarter century of attacks on social programs in general, and civilian disaster relief capabilities in particular.

[cthrumatrix]

3. IMHO this is by design.... the decline of America with a willing media

to hide the truth

[Karmadillo]

4. Chris Matthews just brought up how everyone was happy

to see the military. "It's been a great performance." Only the criminals, he notes, might be unhappy. If only we could have the military everywhere all the time.