NOLA as Test Case


You have to read through this story about the soaring homicide rates in East Coast cities before coming across something extremely significant. Initially it focuses the "provocative" theory that immigrants keep crime down in poor neighborhoods, because they're too busy working, but then you read this:

In interviews with The Associated Press, homicide detectives, criminal justice experts and community activists point to a confluence of other possible factors.

Among them: a failure to adopt some of the innovative practices that have reduced violence in bigger cities; the availability of powerful guns; and a shift in emphasis toward preventing terrorism instead of ordinary street crime.

No shiite. In fact, the all-terrorism-all-the-time squawk from wingnuttia underscores their overall slacker attitude when it comes to governing (and nevermind for now the the whole canard is just an excuse for Team Bush cronies to feed at the public trough). It's a self-fulfilling prophesy that others have pointed out previously, and which at least of late have been manifest perhaps more than anywhere else right down here along the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans. Good government simply would not play a vicious game of blame the victims a la Team Bush and their wingnut legions.

But...blame the victim is exactly what this administration has done, and has done continuously, once it became apparent in early September of 2005 that they were clueless. Since then, New Orleans in particular has been forced to endure the brunt of this (I still remember the remarkable-and-not-in-a-good-way-but-in-an-unbelievably-cynical-and-ugly-way that Congresscreep Chris Shays lectured impoverished women of color from New Orleans about "political corruption" in the Crescent City. I'm surprised he didn't don blackface and do his version of an old minstrel show. Good god: a member of the 109th Congress lecturing about "corruption" is like a priest lecturing on the evils of pederasty).

But...as people have pointed out, as New Orleans goes, so goes the nation. The problems that have plagued the Crescent City--problems residents have been told are their own fault--are showing up elsewhere. Hmmm...

Maybe the problem ISN'T with the citizenry, but with the government that constantly blusters about "protecting the American people," but never actually DOES much of anything when the chips are down...well, never does anything except blame the victims...who just happen to BE the American people.

And I won't even go into Scalia having a problem distinguishing between Jack Bauer on teevee and reality...