The Over-Responders

Tony Snow wrote in Townhall Hurricane Katrina not only covered New Orleans in toxic goo, it also flushed out a large, vocal and potentially pestilential cadre of First Over-Responders.

Whose verbal goo was even more toxic

Rep. Bob Wexler set the stage just minutes after the first levee burst by accusing President Bush of gross incompetence. Rep. Harold Ford followed shortly after with an artless race-card play, wondering aloud why so many people of color had been stranded.

New Orleans is over 2/3 black. Could that have had anything to do with it?

In time, virtually every Democratic panjandrum found some novel way to politicize the Atlantic typhoon. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton inveigled against the evils of Big Oil. Sen. Edward Kennedy suggested holding a forum on New Orleans' racial and economic tensions -- during John Roberts' Supreme Court confirmation hearings. There was talk of shutting off future tax cuts, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, firing Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, recalling all National Guard units from Iraq and revamping the federal government's plans for dealing with terrorist attacks.

Was there anything they had wanted in the past that they did not suggest that if they had just had it the problem would not have happened, or would have been much better?

Opinions wildly outnumbered facts among the Over-Responders. At one point, Randall Robinson alleged that locals were cannibalizing the bloated and blistered bodies of the city's dead, while rap star Kanye West repeated the urban legend that black looters were described as "looters," while whites were designated as "survivors."