"Paddling One’s Own Canoe"
Tags: welfare state, lootingFrom this:
During the first few days of the disaster every commentator, whether liberal or conservative, tearfully bemoaned the fact of “the poor choice those people made” by staying in New Orleans. Opting to stay eight feet below sea level while a category four hurricane is bearing down upon a city whose levees can only withstand a category three hurricane was not the first “poor choice” those people have made. For many of the people trapped in New Orleans their life has consisted of a long series of “poor choices.” At age 13 they choose to get pregnant; they choose not to study and to drop out of school; they choose a life of drug abuse; they choose to wear clothes and speak in a manner that does not positively impress potential employers; and, they choose to vote for the very people who have made making these poor choices bearable and therefore inevitable. One must ask, “Why have they not learned by their mistakes?” The answer of course is nanny government. As all traditional conservatives know, when nanny government, i.e., the socialist state, is determined to “paddle their canoe for them,” a people will always be a dependent people not an independent people…
…Adding insult to injury, our conservative Republican president came to New Orleans looking and sounding more like Lyndon B. Johnson or Franklin D. Roosevelt and declared that the Federal government would rebuild New Orleans. So now we can expect something akin to FDR’s social security boondoggle or LBJ’s war on poverty fiasco combined with big government bureaucrats, rules and regulation as they reconstruct New Orleans. What more could a liberal Democrat have asked for from big government? Our conservative Republican has out done the liberals! With one last slap in the face for the people who were “paddling their own canoe,” the President in an address at the National Cathedral declared that the lawlessness in New Orleans was a reaction to the legacy of “discrimination and injustice” those unfortunate looters had to endure. What kind of airhead wrote such a speech and better yet, what kind of airhead would give such a speech? The government of New Orleans has been under the control of the Black population for over twenty-five years. Jim Crow died with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, over 41 years ago. The current mayor of New Orleans, as well as many of his predecessors, is Black; the current governor of Louisiana is a liberal Democrat who was elected by over 80% of the voters in New Orleans. Even in the face of such evidence, our conservative Republican President asserts that “discrimination and injustice” is the root cause of lawlessness in New Orleans. Who is left to blame for the lawlessness if the looters are not responsible? Here we see our conservative Republican President once again sounding more like LBJ than the conservatives who elected him; the only people left to blame is the middle class folks who were busy “paddling their own canoe” during these tragic times. For traditional Southern conservatives Katrina once again proves that as for the National Republican Party is concerned, Southerners must still sit upon their “stool of eternal repentance.”
