As American aid starts piling up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the earthquake Tuesday afternoon our media has been falling over themselves trying to compare the Haitian earthquake to Hurricane Katrina and to give President Obama ANY sort of a success – even when it makes no sense – while giving President Bush another raking over the coals. The media and the Obama Administration are politicizing the tragedy when Obama’s numbers are falling quickly into the toilet.
Well… their stories are predictable and – surprise, surprise – wrong. We’re talking about ‘apples and oranges’ as the saying goes. If the media wants to make an apt correlation they would have to compare the Haitian disaster to the tsunami in Southeast Asia. The response to both disasters by the United States looks to be about the same. We are doing in Haiti and did in Southeast Asia what the United States always does. We sent whatever was necessary to help those who were in need. We’ll back up our initial response with money, supplies and support to help rebuild what was destroyed. It’s who we are and it’s what we do.
For the media and the Obama people to make this into their own pat-on-the-back is a travesty. In the midst of all this destruction we have to endure the White House rushing to the cameras to make the Haitian earthquake into a “look at what I did” moment. Maybe Obama should take a page from the Bush playbook and just do his job and let history judge him for what he is doing rather than try to bend the news in every cycle.
If you want a stark difference between Obama and Bush you would have to see the difference in the way the two men approached the situation. Bush did what had to be done focusing on the problem and giving the military the approval to do what they had to do. Obama made the same moves to get the military in to help, but he ran to the media with a ‘look what I did’ approach.
In order for the media comparison to be anywhere NEAR close between New Orleans and Haiti, Haiti would have to be in a Republican state in the U.S. Money would have had to have been sent to Haiti for years to shore up the buildings against earthquakes (the charities that have been doing work in Haiti don’t count in this scenario), but the money would have siphoned off for ‘other projects.’ Once disaster struck the Republican leadership would have to call the Republican governor of Haiti and tell them to hold off federal help because they didn’t want Obama to get any kind of victory – as the Democrat leadership did at the time of Katrina when they called the governor of Louisiana and told her to hold off Bush as long as she could – and she did it. There would have to be total confusion at the local and state level and all the media stories out of Haiti would have to be wrong or distorted so badly no one would know what was going on. Then all of us bloggers would have to run out with stories about how Obama and Biden planted charges under Haiti to cause the catastrophe. And that would be just to put it on an even footing for comparison. The incompetence of the media in New Orleans covering the story added to the panic as much as the incompetence of the Democrat leaders on the ground there at the time.
So, in all fairness – and “fairness” is something the American media lost sight of years ago – the Haitian earthquake has to be compared to the Southeast Asian tsunami if you want to compare apples-to-apples and expect the comparison to make sense. The problem for the media is President Bush did all the right things the right way with the tsunami – setting the template for President Obama to follow now – and they would have nothing to talk about now. They certainly would have no “Katrina Drum” to keep beating over and over – even when the message they are sending is mostly a lie.
But, why let truth get in the way of another “we love Obama” moment for the media. I’ll bet their legs are tingling now…
Well… their stories are predictable and – surprise, surprise – wrong. We’re talking about ‘apples and oranges’ as the saying goes. If the media wants to make an apt correlation they would have to compare the Haitian disaster to the tsunami in Southeast Asia. The response to both disasters by the United States looks to be about the same. We are doing in Haiti and did in Southeast Asia what the United States always does. We sent whatever was necessary to help those who were in need. We’ll back up our initial response with money, supplies and support to help rebuild what was destroyed. It’s who we are and it’s what we do.
For the media and the Obama people to make this into their own pat-on-the-back is a travesty. In the midst of all this destruction we have to endure the White House rushing to the cameras to make the Haitian earthquake into a “look at what I did” moment. Maybe Obama should take a page from the Bush playbook and just do his job and let history judge him for what he is doing rather than try to bend the news in every cycle.
If you want a stark difference between Obama and Bush you would have to see the difference in the way the two men approached the situation. Bush did what had to be done focusing on the problem and giving the military the approval to do what they had to do. Obama made the same moves to get the military in to help, but he ran to the media with a ‘look what I did’ approach.
In order for the media comparison to be anywhere NEAR close between New Orleans and Haiti, Haiti would have to be in a Republican state in the U.S. Money would have had to have been sent to Haiti for years to shore up the buildings against earthquakes (the charities that have been doing work in Haiti don’t count in this scenario), but the money would have siphoned off for ‘other projects.’ Once disaster struck the Republican leadership would have to call the Republican governor of Haiti and tell them to hold off federal help because they didn’t want Obama to get any kind of victory – as the Democrat leadership did at the time of Katrina when they called the governor of Louisiana and told her to hold off Bush as long as she could – and she did it. There would have to be total confusion at the local and state level and all the media stories out of Haiti would have to be wrong or distorted so badly no one would know what was going on. Then all of us bloggers would have to run out with stories about how Obama and Biden planted charges under Haiti to cause the catastrophe. And that would be just to put it on an even footing for comparison. The incompetence of the media in New Orleans covering the story added to the panic as much as the incompetence of the Democrat leaders on the ground there at the time.
So, in all fairness – and “fairness” is something the American media lost sight of years ago – the Haitian earthquake has to be compared to the Southeast Asian tsunami if you want to compare apples-to-apples and expect the comparison to make sense. The problem for the media is President Bush did all the right things the right way with the tsunami – setting the template for President Obama to follow now – and they would have nothing to talk about now. They certainly would have no “Katrina Drum” to keep beating over and over – even when the message they are sending is mostly a lie.
But, why let truth get in the way of another “we love Obama” moment for the media. I’ll bet their legs are tingling now…
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