A few days ago I had
the lead story at the Daily Caller, about Barack Obama’s
multiple hypocrisies related to hurricane relief — as a follow-up
on last week’s big story about Obama’s race-baiting 2007 speech at
Hampton University. He misrepresented G.W. Bush’s record,
contradicted his own record, and then failed, as president, to live
up to his own standards. Or to put it another way, in
sum, Obama indicated to a black audience that the Bush
administration refused to help black people by failing to waive a
requirement Bush actually did effectively waive, just 12 days after
Obama himself had bucked a Senate majority to vote against a bill
that would waive the requirement Obama criticized – and then, when
president, Obama refused to waive the same requirement despite
pleas to do so.
As for Bush’s record (quoting from my piece): “The
administration released to Louisiana $450 million in Community
Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds, and then allowed the state to
use those very federal funds as if they were local funds,
for purposes of providing the 10 percent Stafford Act ‘match.’ From
its own finances generated in-state, the state of Louisiana was not
actually required to generate one red cent to attract the federal
disaster-relief monies. In addition, President Bush did formally
waive even the formality of the ‘match’ requirement five separate
times for debris removal and emergency services.”
To tell the truth,
in my first-ever story for the AmSpec print edition, I myself
criticized Bush for using CDBG funds rather than a different means
of helping Katrina victims. I wrote at the time that Bush was both
not effectively generous enough and TOO generous (the CDBG part was
the “too generous” aspect of it) at the same time. But, once the
immediate post-Katrina fumbling was past, nobody can fault Bush for
his administration’s effort in long-term recovery
assistance, even if one can fault the way it chose to
structure the effort. To suggest, as Obama did, that there was some
sort of racial animus involved is just too disgustingly,
demagogically, race-baitingly despicable for any serious would-be
statesman ever to have done.
In addition to the fact that Obama has refused to waive Stafford
Act requirements for victims of Hurricane Isaac after blasting Bush
for supposedly not waiving them for Katrina victims, there also is
this:
U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican, and others also
complained that the administration had failed to deliver on
promises Vice President Joe Biden made to the effect that the Obama
administration would forgive $705 million in community disaster
loans provided by the federal government after Katrina. Instead,
the administration devised rules for loan forgiveness that only
Orleans, but not the (white) surrounding parishes, could meet
http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2010/08/obama_administration_should_fo.html.
Today, my
Daily Caller piece generated
a follow-up at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. This story may
have legs.
