Shut Up I

There's a little folder nestled inside my blog bookmarks with a dozen or so right-wing blogs. There used to be a couple I read every day and commented on occasionally, but around the time their pet adventure in Iraq started going south the civility and rationality some had prided themselves on (deservedly or not) flew out the window and I just gave up. There's a couple I read on a sporadic basis, but I don't mine them for material. If you see a piece about Powerline here it's close to a sure bet I saw a link somewhere else.

I really wanted no part of any reaction to Katrina from the right, and I was just following a link about some information I was curious about when I wound up at RedState.org and found this:

Dear Less-Than-Decent Left :

We interrupt your previously scheduled shrieking of "Blame Chimpy McBushitlerCo!" and "We can blame this all on global warming!" to bring you this much-needed dose of reality:

We don't want to ruin your little view of the world, but America's corporate giants are stepping up in a big way to help those in need.

The link, incidentally, took me to a Kos entry talking about the reduction of our National Guard forces. How that qualifies as blaming Chimpy McBushitlerCo or global warming I'm as unclear on as how corporate donations refute it.

The science behind global warming speaks for itself, and your political objections don't change a thing. As for Bush, maybe it's now time Republicans start accepting responsibility for what they've wrought. In reality it's long overdue, but a generation of insisting that taxes be cut and cut and cut, offered as a Unified Theory of Improving Everything, followed by a foolhardy invasion of Iraq manned largely by the National Guard and Army reserve in order to avoid the political fallout of conscription, now lie on the President's doorstep. That criticism is fair and justified.

Well at that point some instinct I should have resisted took hold of me and I checked in with Michelle Malkin. I think I already knew what I'd find:

Meanwhile, over at the Daily Kos , one diarist and some of his commenters are going absolutely insane with their Bush hatred and blaming him for wanting to kill off black residents of New Orleans.

Insane.

I pray other liberal bloggers will rise above this muck and join the blogger relief effort.

Now, first, I give Michelle credit for the rhetorical restraint of directing her objections to the people who actually made the comments instead of blaming Norbizness' alter ego. And I thank her for her prayers. I return the compliment by saluting the efforts of those right-wing bloggers' relief effort she touted without noting that I personally imagine anyone who can find his way onto the internet can also find a way to contact the Red Cross without my putting up a banner.

But the thing that struck me amidst the humanitarianism was that the twenty-five mentions of the word "looting" on her front page included this:

A state police official, Col. Henry Whitehorn of the Louisiana State Police, says: "Based on what I've seen on the news, there's a lot of chaos." Oooo-kay. No condemnation of the looting. No warning to looters that they will pay consequences.

In a natural disaster which in New Orleans alone may dwarf anything we've experienced in the last century, where thousands of people, mostly poor, are stranded without electricity in 90º heat, with no running water, no food, and little or no information, just exactly where should preventing people from taking what's of use to themselves from stores which will never open to sell it to them rank on our list of priorities? What "consequences" should we be threatening them with? I ask in all seriousness; I'm eager to learn how the "humanitarian" mind works.