Storms of Stupidity

Storms of Stupidity on the Op-Ed Pages
by Will Wilkinson
Cato Institute.

The tragedy and travesty of Katrina and New Orleans has three basic parts: (1) very, very bad weather hitting a perilously situated city; (2) government failure at the local, state, and federal level; (3) the poverty of New Orleans, ensuring a large population unable to leave town. Unless Katrina was meteorological retribution for the GMC Yukon Denali XL, the weather doesn't require an explanation. But the other parts of the story do. Why did government fail so totally to fulfill its basic tasks? Why does Orleans Parish have a poverty rate of 34%, almost triple the national average?

These are hard questions that demand serious answers. But rather than offer serious answers, the wise scribes at America's elite newspapers prefer to use the occasion of disaster, death, and mourning to parade their benighted ideological prejudices.