Katrina and the issue of blame

From Burt Prelutsky:

The people I could not begin to fathom were those like Robert Kennedy Jr., the self-proclaimed energy conservationist who flies hither and thither in private jets, who blamed President Bush for the disaster. If only he had signed the Kyoto Accord, according to Kennedy and his cronies, Katrina would have been nothing more than a gentle breeze. Working their selective memories overtime, they ignore the fact that hurricanes have been with us far longer than George Bush has been in the White House, longer even than there's even been a White House or an aerosol can.

It begs the question whether there is any evil, any calamity, that could take place anywhere on Earth that these people wouldn't lay at the feet of the poor guy. When you start scapegoating the president for the pranks of Mother Nature, where does it end? Their hatred of Bush is so all-encompassing that I suspect it must strike even many of those who don't share the man's politics as preposterous. I suppose they will next suggest that the snake in the Garden of Eden hissed with a Texas accent.

The truth is, if anybody is to blame for the misery in New Orleans, it's Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who ignored the warnings of his engineers, in 1718, when he created a settlement below sea level in a swampland between the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Voila, New Orleans!

Leave it to a Frenchman.