He makes some good points in this excerpt, though the first part of the column is typical Buchanan. I especially like the notion that half the money we will spend on that stupid bridge in Alaska would have fixed the levees in New Orleans.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46188Summer is over for America – and George Bush. That unifying image of Bush atop the pile of debris in lower Manhattan days after 9-11 has been displaced by ugly accusations and recriminations over who lost New Orleans. Katrina has exposed the limits of federal power and the absence of a serious set of national priorities.
In New Orleans, those who relied on government – the New Orleans police, the mayor, Gov. Blanco, FEMA – suffered most. Those who relied on themselves for food, water and safety from marauding mobs of rapists and looters, with guns in their homes, fared best. Ultimately, U.S. and Guard troops had to provide the security before government agencies and volunteers could do their rescue work.
But hour-by-hour coverage of the damage done by Katrina to an area of the South as large as Britain must bring home the truth: We are a self-indulgent nation and an overextended empire.
Before Bush went off on his five-week vacation, he signed a $286 billion highway bill containing $24 billion in pork – 6,300 earmarked projects, among which was a quarter-billion-dollar bridge from Ketchikan, Alaska, population 8,000, to Gravina Island, population 50.
Had half that sum been spent fortifying the levees of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans would not be underwater today.