Blaming the Victims

Part of the White House response to the political dimension of Katrina is apparently to spread the idea that the people remaining in New Orleans have only themselves to blame for their predicament (or their deaths). Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had this to say to Wolf Blitzer on Thursday:

Well, I think the death toll may go into the thousands. And unfortunately, that’s going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the evacuation warnings. And I don’t make judgments about why people choose not to evacuate.

But, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. And to find people still there is just heart wrenching to me because the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there. And so we’ve got to figure out some way to convince people that when evacuation warnings go out, it’s for their own good.

Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security, also made the point:

“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.“

Now I expect this sort of absolute lack of empathy from Bush, but has he staffed his entire administration with other sociopaths? I don’t expect them to have spent a lot of time talking to poor, elderly, or disabled people, but can’t they exercise a little imagination and understand that not everyone has a car (or limo and driver) , a credit card, or perhaps multiple homes — that maybe some people don’t have much “choice” about evacuating when there’s no government help? Some of the people trapped in New Orleans are even relatively wealthy tourists who couldn’t get out after the airport closed.

Fortunately, although conservatives often view poverty as a sign of moral failure, not all Bush supporters are picking up the rhetoric. On Friday’s Diane Rehm Show, even the odious Tony Blankley — someone willing to hint last year that George Soros had been a Nazi collaborator — wouldn’t go along with it (my transcript):

Obviously for middle-class folks like us, if we have to run, we go to the Hyatt, we give them a piece of plastic, we sit up on the eighteenth floor, and we get room service. For a person who has nothing, their decision to leave their home isn’t only a decision to leave their home. If they have a choice between being homeless back home or being homeless in a strange town, you pick back home. So an awful lot of understanding has to be given to people who decided to stay who were poor.

I’m not sure how “middle-class” Blankley really is, but at least he’s showing a lot more compassion than the Bush administration he supports.