Doug Wiken has a comment on Mount Blogmore where he downplays lying under oath when the issue of Bill Clinton’s impeachment was brought up. Then he dismisses immoral behavior:
We can be appalled by Clinton’s lack of sexual discretion and can condemn that as a moral failing, but it has next to nothing to do with governance. The impeachment was an attempt to defeat Clinton by other means.
There is another comment by some anonymous chicken labeled "Lisa" that also downplays Clinton’s immoral behaviors:
I’m not sure what the "Swift Boat" campaign is. I think that Bush should be brought up on impeachment charges to answer the multitude of questions that has brought our nation to the point it is at. Our government was so willing to do just that when President Clinton received fellatio from another consenting adult (and lied about it; who wouldn’t have!) yet this currently sitting president can send thousands of our cognitively intact individuals to their death.
Wiken also accuses President Bush of lying about the Iraq War:
Bush looked us in the eye and lied about war and sacred honor. Already nearly 2000 young Americans have died.
So this is how the far-left secular socialists operate. They say it’s OK to lie about immoral acts, even under oath. To the secularist, morality is not important. Lying is OK. The truth doesn’t matter to them. They even attack the Swift Boat vets for standing up to the lies of John Kerry and expect President Bush to be impeached for such actions. How ridiculous is that?
But they are not done. They then accuse the Commander in Chief of lying about the Iraq War. Where is their stained dress? WMD? Most everybody including Democrats thought Saddam had them. Congress even voted to approve of the War in Iraq. Being wrong does not qualify as lying. But the secular left could care less about bearing false witness against thy neighbor. And as they do so, they embolden our enemies.
Wiken also brings up another myth being spread by the MSM:
Bush, Inc. pushed for massive government reorganization claiming it was needed to combat terrorism and what it actually did was stuff political hacks into control of agencies like FEMA. The consequences of that sure seem like a better reason for impeachment than anything Clinton ever did.
Let us put a little Intellectual Activism into this issue of Katrina and FEMA. A post by Robert Tracinski points out that the lying left in conjunction with the MSM is putting the blame in the wrong place:
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us.
Tracinski compares the environment to Iraq:
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
I don’t suppose the secularist would be alarmed by such immoral behavior, anymore than they are outraged by those suicide bombers who are killing innocent men, women, and children in Iraq.
Tracinski goes further to explain what was behind the acts of murder and rape in New Orleans:
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
What we are seeing in New Orleans is not a failure of FEMA, but the result of the environment created by the secular socialist movement. The socialism of the far-left created a welfare state of helpless government dependents who fell prey to the immoral acts that the secularists refuse to condemn. Acts that the secularists tolerant as the government refuses to keep such people locked up. And with regard to Iraq, the secularists ignore the immoral acts of the terrorists as they blame the deaths they cause on President Bush.
Tracisnky then ends by pointing out that the MSM is not reporting the truth:
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans.
And that is the story that no one is reporting.
