Left Jumps at the Katrina Comparison While Ingrate Americans Are Evacuated

RUSH: Look, I was wondering how the left was going to play this. I started thinking about this yesterday. I made some references to this on yesterday’s program, because here’s the thing: When all you care about is winning elections — when that’s all you care about is winning elections and figuring out talking points that will help you — then life can get pretty complicated, maybe a Tad Too Divine complicated. When there is no right or wrong in your mind, when there’s no “politics stops at the water’s edge” to restrain you, when the only thing that matters is winning an election, weeeeell, then you’ve got a real problem! How does the left play the evacuation in Lebanon? Supportive? Critical?
Not so fast, ladies and gentlemen!
Do the Dean and Pelosi crowd and Harry Reid today say the evacuations are too slow and do they try to revisit Hurricane Katrina? Now, the Drive-By Media is doing this. But do the Democrats do this? Or do they say the rescues are going pretty smoothly and suggest that it’s not Katrina because the evacuees are largely, a-hem, fair-skinned. It’s hard to say that this is Katrina because Katrina was about the fact that the administration “didn’t care about black people.” Well, this certainly can’t be said of the evacuation from Lebanon or from Beirut. Keep in mind here, folks, we are talking core beliefs. The corest of the core liberal belief.
They’ve got one core belief, and that’s winning elections, and then after that taking away as much of your money and your freedom as they can. But before they can do that they have to win an election. So does the left say, “Well, we already own the black vote so we don’t have to revisit Katrina here,” or do they want to fire up African-American turnout? Do they play the race card or do they play the incompetence card? Do they say, “This administration can’t handle it! This is terrible,” or do they say, “This administration is racist”? and say, “Look how fast they’re acting. They’re sending boats; they’re doing everything they can to get people out of there. It may not be going as quickly as we want, but they didn’t do this in Katrina.
Do they play it that way? The answer will not come from me, will not come from you,. It won’t even come from the New York Times. The answer will come from polls and focus groups. As Bob Dylan once sang, ladies and gentlemen, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the polls. (laughing) The Democrats, I’m sure they’re out focus-grouping this right now. Now, they may have already had their answer handed to them by the Drive-By Media. Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi have returned to the scene of the original drive-by, which is Katrina. The Lebanon evacuation is just like that now. Here’s a montage of various leftists.

JACK CAFFERTY: Remember Katrina? France has gotten more than 700 of their people out!
CHRIS JANSING: Sort of brought back, you know, the whole Katrina thing.
ANDERSON COOPER: It’s like Katrina all over again.
NANCY PELOSI: Just another manifestation of the Katrina mentality.
HARRY REID: It is too bad that this is being treated as a mini Katrina.
ANDREA KOPPEL: The slow response that the Bush administration had after Katrina…
MILES O’BRIEN: One of the people we talked to earlier today equated it to…Katrina!
KATE SNOW: Some in Capitol Hill are bringing up memories of Hurricane Katrina.
DAVID SHUSTER: The image of Americans terrified has burned the Bush administration before following Hurricane Katrina.
PAULA ZAHN: You have heard Katrina, calling it “a mini-Katrina.”
RUSH: All right, so the voices there were: Jack Cafferty of CNN, Chris Jansing of PMSNBC, Anderson Cooper of CNN, Dingy Harry, Andrea Koppel of CNN, Miles O’Brien of CNN, Kate Snow (ex-CNN, now ABC), David Shuster PMSNBC, and Paula Zahn CNN. But it gets even better. Gets even better. CNN this morning found an ingrate to compare her evacuation to Katrina. Soledad O’Brien interviewing an American student, Ashley Marinaccio. Soledad says, “The first massive evacuation by a ship of Americans done by the Norwegians. Does that surprise you?”
MARINACCIO: I mean, look at the evacuations from Katrina. We didn’t expect to be getting out any time soon.
RUSH: Okay, then what are you complaining about? What was the lesson of Hurricane Katrina? I’m going to hold my fire. We’ve got two more bites. We’ve got two more bites from this ingrate. Soledad O’Brien, next question: “It sounded like a pretty awful trip. It looks hot. You see people covering themselves with tarp and sort of arranging their children around cardboard. Describe what that was like. Pretty crowded on that ship?”
MARINACCIO: Yee-ah! Unfortunately a floating refugee camp. It was awful because, um —
RUSH: Floating refugee camp.
MARINACCIO: — there’s people with ten kids, you know, seriously, ten kids, and, um, they’re trying to get food and then there’s other people yelling saying that they’re stealing food, and you know. I — I’m assuming that they were hungry, because they had been there since 9:00 and apparently from what I hear, um, at around 11:00 when they came around giving food out, this was the first time people were being fed. Yeah, it was sad.
RUSH: And one more. Did you notice in that first montage how similar the Democrats like Dingy Harry and Pelosi sounded to the media? I mean, it’s obvious the talking points have gone out. Next question: “Highly organized, we’re on it, we’re do a good job. Is that how you would describe the evacuation?”
MARINACCIO: I mean, the boat’s not made to hold people. I mean, it wasn’t comfortable. and there were lots of flies. It was, um… By the end the trip, people were sort of going crazy.

RUSH: I mentioned yesterday: the state department, over the course of my lifetime, has issued evac warnings from people to get out, because hostilities are about to break out or have broken out in various places, and I don’t know that in the past we’ve had airlifts and that we’ve chartered American Airline and Delta Airline jets and sent them over to where these Americans were to get them out of there. It’s always been something Americans do on their own. If they keep people talking about Hurricane Katrina here, it is that government has limited abilities. To have these expectations is absurd, and to have the ungrateful attitude about this.
You know, here’s a little question I have. Why are all those Americans over there in the first place? What are they doing over there in the first place? I’m sure they don’t think they’re in Bermuda, so what are they doing? I know that some of them are going to college. Why would you want to go to college in Lebanon? Why would you want to do that? Why are you there? “What business is it of yours, Rush?” I’m not making any business. I’m just asking a question that I know is controversial. Yes: If we have to pay to get them home it’s our business. Why are they there in the first place? Why are we having to pay for it? What is this?
It’s their life. They have responsibility. Whatever happened to the notion that people have to take responsibility for themselves? The government can help, but it can’t do it all. “School Bus” Nagin actually made this statement not long ago. I think it was close to the first of hurricane season back on the 1st of June. “School Bus” Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, to make sure that his city knew what the limitations of his government and the state government and the federal government were, told everybody in that city during his inauguration or whatever: This happens again, you get yourself out. The buses are going to run, but you get yourself out.
But one thing that Katrina has told us is: Take care of yourself.
Katrina was a failure of citizenship. There were three failures: Failure of government at three levels and a failure of citizenship, and this is a failure of citizenship in a sense, all these people sitting around waiting. “Well, Rush, it’s tough to move around Beirut, tough to move around.” It’s a war zone in the first place! What do you expect when you go there? You know you’re not going to Bermuda. You know, they went into a country that only recently was able to move the Syrian regular army out that has Hezbollah in its government, and where Hezbollah has controlled the southern region for years.
Did it ever occur to these people that a war might break out while they were there? Did it ever occur to them to maybe make some plans to get out of there if there were signs that this was going to happen? And I’ll tell you something. You know whose job it is to get people out of there? I mentioned at the top of this monolog: the state department. That’s the Department of State that the libs love. That is their haven. This is a state department botched operation. We’re not going to hear about that, though. We’re going to be hearing about how the Bush administration is replicating its incompetence in Hurricane Katrina.
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RUSH: You know, it does sort of go to what I have been saying for the past couple of weeks: Are we really a nation with the will to do what needs to be done in the war on terror? When you listen to these spoiled brat, ingrate Americans, whining about, “There were flies on the boat, and it cost me $200 to get on! (crying) Where is any government? Where is my government? Look at my government! (sobbing)” and the government’s there, and the government’s doing what it can, but this is not the government’s responsibility. The government didn’t send you over there. It’s not the government’s responsibility to first and foremost get you out. That’s your responsibility.
But here we have a life in this country that’s so cushy, the expectations are so high, that when a little hardship like going without food for a couple of hours or riding on a cramped boat out of a war zone. Where do they think they are anyway? They’re in the Third World for all practical purposes. This is the kind of stuff that’s alarming. You wonder: Do we have enough citizens with backbone to deal with the challenges we have ahead of us. I happen to think that we do. I just think the Drive-By Media loves finding these little whiners and these moaners and these groaners, because remember what the prism of all of this is. I don’t care. There’s no doubt about this.
The whole point of the coverage of this war is how Bush blew it. Bush let this happen. Bush wasn’t paying attention. Bush was distracted in Iraq for whatever cockamamie conspiratorial reason. Bush was this; Bush was that. Cheney was over there. Rumsfeld stinks. Rice stinks. They should have been canned, voted out, fired, impeached, whatever, months ago, years ago — and that’s the action line on this story, and in the midst of all this, look at what’s happening. We’ve got, now, the Hezbollah which yesterday treated to puff piece profiles, Hassan Nasrallah on CNN, now blowing up Nazareth, which is a holy — well, they sent a couple rockets in there — holy city, of course, in Israel.
They’re claiming: “Hey, we got 13,000 rockets,” and Hezbollah, Iran said: “Hey, we’re ready for World War III. We’re going to attack you, United States. We’re not afraid of you.” In the midst of all this, guess who the bad guy continues to be — and we’re not even there? The United States! Even in the eyes of our ingrate, spoiled-rotten little children, brat-type ingrate citizens in Beirut, it’s our fault. (Crying.) “It’s a war zone. It’s a war! How do I get out? (crying) We’re having to shield ourselves from the sun in cardboard.” (sobbing) That’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing, and then they can’t even come up with the 200 bucks to get out.
How did they get over there? We know they sure as hell didn’t swim. (sigh) Speaking of Hezbollah, the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF “has found that Hezbollah is preventing its civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon.” At least our spoiled brat Americans could get out of there. Hezbollah is not letting its civilians in southern Lebanon leave. “Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent Lebanese residents from leaving, while in other villages, Hezbollah is preventing UN representatives from getting in. They’re trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hezbollah have broken out.”
Now, why do you think that is, folks? They want the civilian death count to skyrocket! They want the Israeli strikes to kill civilians. These are the people praised all day yesterday by CNN for having so much compassion, “social programs,” sewage treatment plants, whatever the hell else they said they had. Now they’re making sure that these poor people hang around so on that they’re part of the death count so they can make a PR spin move and say, “Look at what Israel is doing! Israel is killing civilians!” Well, I don’t know how widely reported what I just told you is. It is out there, but you have to access certain websites to do it. It’s the kind of thing that’s not being reported in public.

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