Blaming Bush for Hurricane Katrina

The usual suspects are out claiming that it’s really President Bush who is responsible for the damage that Hurricane Katrina has caused. At Marquette that includes Zach Corey of the 1832 blog, and a hodge-podge of Bush haters nationally and internationally has joined in.

Corey’s article is based on 20/20 hindsight. He argues that if Bush had allocated more money to flood control somehow the disaster would not have happened. Of course, he has no way of knowing that any spending would have been used for something that would have actually helped during the hurricane rather than funding just another pork barrel project, which is what most “flood control” money does. Indeed, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is in charge of such matters, has a record of doing perverse things like trying to prevent flooding of low value land upstream, which has the effect of channeling more water downstream, making problems there worse.

Furthermore, Corey assumes that Bush would have had some way of knowing that the next big storm would hit New Orleans, rather than somewhere else on the Gulf Coast, or on the Atlantic Coast.

Corey even makes the following argument, quoting Sydney Blumenthal:

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken.

Sorry to break this to you, Zach, but if the Corps of Engineers proposed a study last year, it probably would not have been completed until 2007 or so (no matter how lavishly Bush funded it), and couldn’t have produced any payoff in terms of protection until the end of the decade, at best.

Tech Central station has a good round-up of other carping here and abroad.

Ironically, the favorite newspaper of the anti-Bush crowd, the New York Times debunked the notion that global warming (which the left assumes to be Bush’s fault) has any role in the current rash of storms. According to the Times:

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.

It seems that in the U.S., just as in Iraq, the left enjoys and will exploit human tragedy for political gain.