The Buck Doesn't Stop With George Will

George Will's recent editorial regarding Hurricane Katrina, and the problems of the poor, appalled me. Will's chutzpah is incredible: he blames the problems of the poor, and by extension, their vulnerability to Hurricane Katrina, to that old bogeyman - you guessed it - liberals!:

The idea that Hurricane Katrina would change the only thing that matters -- thinking -- perished even more quickly, at about the time Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a suitable symbol of congressional narcissism, dramatized the severity of the tragedy by taking a television interviewer on a helicopter flight over her destroyed beach house. "Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost," she said in a speech on the Senate floor that moved some senators to tears. You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed. Louisiana's congressional delegation larded the bill with $540,580,200 worth of earmarks, one-fifth the price of a capable levee.

Will's part of the blame game ignores lots of factors, like the historic role of race in determining the settlement patterns around New Orleans. In addition, the nation's spending priorities have largely been under the control of conservatives for many years now - since 1980, actually. For years now, even during the Clinton Administration, liberals have not had that much influence over determining what pork gets into highway spending bills, or what the priority is on levee maintenance, but conservatives have had that influence, and continue to do so.

Will's complacent ignorance is amazing. Referring to statements by Illinois Senator Barack Obama:

He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: Graduate from high school, don't have a baby until you are married, don't marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.

Has Will ever heard of health problems? Or extended periods of unemployment? It's very easy in America for married and unmarried people of all ages to fall into poverty!

Will is not content to blame liberals, but rather blame the victims as well, even if many of them are children, or the elderly:

Liberalism's post-Katrina fearlessness in discovering the obvious -- if an inner city is inundated, the victims will be disproportionately minorities -- stopped short of indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands. Because it was released during the post-Katrina debacle, scant attention was paid to the National Center for Health Statistics' report that in 2003, 34.6 percent of all American births were to unmarried women. The percentage among African American women was 68.2.

Given that most African Americans are middle class and almost half live outside central cities, and that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans -- as in some other inner cities -- were to women without husbands. That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine.

Forgive me, if you will, if I never care again about conservative priorities. If conservatives can't be bothered to extend a quick helping hand to African-Americans whose lives are in immediate jeopardy, people from whom they expect services when on vacation in New Orleans, like hotel-room cleaning (then whom they pay a pittance), particularly when those same workers have already been taxed for the service, then conservatives have exiled themselves from their own community - why should I care any longer what they think?

Conservatives underestimate what active, engaged government can do. Big Government can't do everything, or even many things, but it should do those things it can, like work closely with state and local governments to ameliorate natural and man-made catastrophes, as well as ameliorate poverty, which Big Society programs have done well, despite Will's calumnies, for many years now.