VDH Watch 13: Vic sings the blues over New Orleans (again)
Our man Vic is still on the New Orleans beat. In our last VDH Watch, the Republicans' academic crown prince of hackery was giving us the Party line on Katrina. And he's still at it: Our Media Hurricane by Victor Davis Hanson, Tribune Media Services 09/19/05.
So, once again, in my own translation from Middle(brow) Hansonish, the developing Party line of the big hurricane:
* The experience didn't tell us anything at all about global warming, troop shortages, racism or other environmental stuff. And certainly nothing about lack of concern or competence.
* Except for those local and state officials who were "swearing, crying and stupefied". Unlike our manly Dear Leader Bush who was cool and confident in his usual masterful style.
* The Liberal Press tried to use the disaster news to discredit Dear Leader and his mighty works.
* And then there were all these annoying facts and figures and stuff being batted around in the Liberal Press. Who cares about those? It's so much easier to simply sing the praises of Dear Leader and curse his wicked enemies.
* And, shoot, Dear Leader responded magnificently and everything would have been fine except for that, you know, black mayor in New Orleans and one or two deficient underlings. But it was ever so much better than what happens with those lesser nations and peoples like France, Iran or all those Southeast Asian types. Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, whatever - who can keep up?
* All the darn poor people got hurt because they made the lifestyle choice to be poor. So what's all the bleeding heart whining about?
* New Orleans, Aruba, Cindy Sheehan, why are the Liberal Media reporting these minor, unimportant stories anyway? They could instead be singing the praises of Dear Leader. And talking about all the schools, schools, lots of schools that we've been building to assist the lesser peoples of Iraq.
* Did we mention that white folks in Mississippi handled things a lot better?
* Ten thousand dead, 50 dead, why couldn't the Liberal Media get it straight? What the diff, anyway, because most of them were black and poor and that's what they get for choosing to be black and poor.
* And, look, all those stories about toxic chemicals in the flood waters couldn't be true because rescuers were wading through it! Wimpy environmentals and whiny liberals! And what's all this about water, water, everywhere? Water, schmater. There were dry spots in New Orleans! Man, these liberals will whine about anything to try and discredit Dear Leader Bush, the Liberator of Peoples.
But his conclusion is my favorite part, where he does an imitation of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby - a thoroughly hackified version, of course - in order to say it was all a minor event (and besides, it looked like it was black people that got the worst of it, anyway) blown all out of proportion by the Liberal Press:
For all the media's efforts to turn the natural disaster of New Orleans into either a racist nightmare, a death knell for one or the other political parties or an indictment of American culture at large, it was none of that at all. What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated journalists, worried not about truth but about preempting their rivals with an ever more hysterical story, all in a fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the environment and the war.
Let ghoulish CNN file suit against the government to film all the bloated corpses it can find. Let a pontificating PBS "NewsHour" conduct more televised roundtables with grim-faced elites searching out purported national racism. But few any longer trust a frenzied media whose reporters and commentators continually prove as incompetent as they are disingenuous.
Was it too much to ask reporters to look to history to judge this recovery against other past disasters here and abroad? Could they have strived for accuracy instead of ratings - and at least made sure that the images from their cameras did not refute their own predetermined scripts?
Even for someone like Vic writing in middle-brow secular mode, it seems that sometimes a "faith-based" declaration of allegiance to Dear Leader and the wonderful blessings he has brought to his undeserving subjects is all you have to fall back on.
