THIS past weekend marked the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11. Many commentators have compared our response to that tragedy with the recent reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Just as critics have once again exploited the events to advance their own, unrelated dogmatic agendas, they will once again receive their comeuppance when confronted with the stubborn facts.
At first blush, the caustic criticisms we see today seem to contrast with the outpouring of bipartisan unity after Sept. 11. As a former organizer of a student activist group at Princeton University, however, I vividly remember the same opportunistic responses after Sept. 11 now on display again. The same perennial protesters who had opposed globalization, denounced U.S. intervention in Kosovo (which, ironically was to protect Muslims), and marched under the catchall mantle of "social justice" simply adapted their grievances to the issue of terrorism. While the government had not even announced at the time how it would respond, groups like International Answer and MoveOn.org protested nonetheless.
Proving that they are protestors who are at once multipurpose but also without any true purpose, the identical groups are now taking up Katrina as their cause du jour. Last week, MoveOn.org, which had been holding a rally against the war in Iraq across from the White House, transitioned without skipping a beat to protesting the government's response to Katrina. Not only that, but as The Washington Post noted, this extremely versatile and talented group even managed to mix in some messages about the genocide in Sudan. As the Post reported, one demonstrator confessed that they were simply "looking for an excuse to pin something on Bush that will stick." Well, at least they're candid.
Perhaps what has changed this time is that the radicals have succeeded in capturing the Democratic Party -- an unfortunate feat that moderates like Bill Clinton fought so hard to prevent. After being badly battered for offering nothing but obstruction instead of a positive agenda, Democrats must have decided that they have nothing further to lose by going all the way.
Leading the charge in the assault against the Federal Emergency Management Agency is Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) who has proposed taking the agency back out of the Department of Homeland Security. However, it was Clinton's ally, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who first proposed merging FEMA into DHS.
Many skeptics at the time foresaw FEMA's failures today as the natural consequence of putting a hodge-podge of unrelated federal agencies into one giant bureaucracy. Nevertheless, Democrats railroaded Republicans into creating DHS, and Clinton voted for it, including the FEMA takeover. Clinton's about-face now suggests that there was something inherently unsound about restructuring FEMA that is wholly apart from any issue about agency personnel or funding. Oh, those stubborn facts.
Heaping hypocrisy upon hypocrisy, Clinton is also calling for an investigation into Katrina modeled on the 9/11 Commission. Yet, the 9/11 Commission also contributed to weakening FEMA. After the Commission's relentless lobbying, Congress relented last year and consolidated oversight responsibilities over all of DHS, including FEMA, into one committee in each house. These overextended committees were forced to deal with everything from natural disasters to mad cow disease to customs revenue collection to terrorism -- all of which are DHS functions. With so much on their plates, there was no way these committees could have properly supervised FEMA. Oh, those stubborn facts.
At the state level, Louisiana's Democratic congressional delegation has also blasted the Bush administration for allegedly under-funding flood-control projects in the state. Yet, as the Post reported last week, funding for those projects actually increased under Bush. Instead of using that money to protect its citizens, the Post found that Louisiana's delegation looted the fund for their own special interests and pet projects. Oh, those stubborn facts.
The floodgates of partisan sniping and blame-shifting that Katrina has opened have disheartened the vast majority of decent Americans. I regret even having to write such a column when hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless and displaced. But to paraphrase the Billy Joel tune, I didn't start the fire -- it's been always burning. And when the fair-minded American electorate looks at the opportunism, such as the Democratic Senatorial Committee's use of Katrina last week to raise money for its own campaigns, they will see that there is plenty of blame to go around. Democrats just might want to watch their backs and bite their tongues, lest those stubborn facts do them in.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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