Knee-jerk blaming and long-term thinking.

Shawn Macomber wrote in Townhall Once again, the American Left is at odds with itself over whether George W. Bush is the omniscient wizard or brainless Scarecrow.

They just know they don't like him, because his party is in control, and they can't stand being in the minority

This time it didn’t take a tornado or contentious election to send them spiraling skyward toward an alternate Land of Oz where every conspiracy theory, no matter how contradictory, comes to vivid Technicolor life. The excuse this time was a hurricane politicized a full day before it came ashore. So the question at hand seems to be: Which is it? Is Bush — as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Kayne West (among many others) would have us believe — a racist genius who plotted to stall rescuers as human beings died in the street based on the color of their skin? Did he appoint Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Rod Paige purely so he’d have a nice diversity-supporting cover story when he finally got a chance to kill and displace a large number of blacks? And how did he ever pull the wool over the eyes of black officials in Mississippi and Louisiana long enough to surreptitiously enlist them in his dastardly plot?

Or — reverse direction — is he a dunce, who damned an entire section of the country to a watery end with short-sighted environmental policies? Was the Kyoto Protocol an insurance policy for New Orleans Bush tossed away like a rash, petulant child?

Both are so obviously stupid that I can't imagine anyone proposing either one, except I have been watching TV, and I know idiots are suggesting both.

The charge of racism should be so self-evidently ridiculous that there is precious little hope of convincing someone who finds comfort believing it that it is not true. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine any of the “global warming caused Katrina” hysteria being quelled by James Glassman’s brilliant deconstruction of the myth last week.

If the absurd writings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sidney Blumenthal, and a number of Arianna Huffington’s Internet buddies are any indication, the Left believes a President Kerry would somehow have been better prepared and able to avert Katrina’s worst damages. While I’ll be the last to suggest Bush handled this crisis in a completely appropriate manner, Democrats’ recent hype about being the Party of Preparedness lacks an, um, intelligent design.

ROF, LMAO

First of all, I don’t recall candidate Kerry arguing for a two or three-tiered levee system to be built in New Orleans during the 2004 campaign.

And if such a foolish system was built, it should be built from local tax revenues, not federal money. A levee system protecting a city that is 7 to 15 feet below sea level does nothing for taxpayers in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Arizona, or Maine (or any of the other states, for that matter)

(In a sane world, that failure would be evidence of the need for decentralizing control from a Leviathan federal government ill-equipped to understand nuance back to the individual states it lords over.) Also, whether Kerry’s Star Trek-style beaming system eliminating the need for all cars, SUVs, and Hummers (a job Al Gore was better suited for anyway) would have been completed and global warming cured eight months into his administration is questionable as well.

Further, during last year’s campaign Kerry suggested the federal government, “stop diverting oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve until gas prices get back to normal.” Since “normal” apparently translates to a number unconnected to the laws of supply and demand, it is safe to say once the oil was diverted it would not soon be replaced. If Kerry was hoping for China or India to suddenly de-industrialize, it could take a good long while to get back to “normal” indeed.

Like perhaps a cold day in hell?

Kerry was not alone or even the most extreme of the bunch. Throughout the campaign Carl Levin, Charles Schumer, and several other key Democrats openly endorsed using the nation’s strategic oil reserves to flood the market and drive down oil prices. Bush was ridiculed relentlessly by Schumer for refusing to budge from his November 2001 pledge to fill the reserves to capacity.