LESSONS FROM KATRINA

Hurricane Katrina has been no friend to the left wing.
New Orleans has been under Democrat control for generations, as has much of Louisiana's state apparatus. You can trace Democrat influence back to the days when Democrats spent many of their nights in white robes making sure that black Louisianans stayed on the plantation where they belonged.
According to Democrat and left wing theory, New Orleans should have been Heaven on Earth, especially for its majority black population. After all, from the New Deal right on through L.B.J.'s War on Poverty, money was poured into this region ostensibly to eradicate poverty.
Katrina has torn away the protective curtain and revealed to the world just how miserable a failure these leftists have been.
In a time of life and death crisis, most of the poor were left to fend for themselves, with no provision put into action to get them out of harm's way before Katrina had broken the levees. An evacuation plan had been drawn up in New Orleans some six years ago, yet provisions of that plan calling for use of public transit vehicles and school buses to get people out of the city were never put into action.
Democrats have been convincing many that they are the only ones looking out for the poor, for minorities and for the little guy. Yet the reality is that an area of the nation heavily under control of Democrats did not deliver what the rhetoric says.
The reality is that a Republican president and administration alone made things happen in a big way. This is not to excuse the fact that federal response was sluggish, but that is to address another issue, namely, the failure of big government bureaucracies to ever move quickly.
There are many lessons to be learned from Katrina's assault on the Gulf Coast. And one of the biggest is to understand that a Democrat welfare state is not the answer to solving the problems of the little guy.