I just read another article about how Bush failed the people of New Orleans. The gist of the article was how obvious such a calamity was to forsee and how the scope of the tragedy was preventable (at the hands of Bush and Bush alone – forget all of the other levels of government that have a more direct role, or all of the other previous administrations dating back a hundred years or so). As I read the article something came to me – where were all of that particular writer’s articles on the subject? Indeed, where where any of the media’s reports on this – before the hurricane hit, that is? If the scope of such a tragedy was so forseeable, and concrete action-steps to prevent it were within reach, where was the media outcry? Where were the editorials, analysis and articles?

Last I checked the media has a vital role to play in a democracy, so much so that freedom of the press is enshrined in the constitution. You see, in a representative democracy, people elect law makers to make decisions for us. In order for the public to make informed decisions about who to elect and what policies are best, we rely on the press to inform us. Armed with adequate information, Mary and Joe voter can go out and vote for the candidate that best represents their interests, and/or support a particular interest group that can directly lobby the government.
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Our baby girl is here (thanks for the post below Kim). I like to think of myself as kind of a manly man, but I’ve gotta tell you – looking into our new baby girl’s eyes brings tears to mine. Tears of happiness to be sure. But I’m also feeling the enormity of life, of existence, of being. She is so fragile and innocent, so close to still being in the womb, yet when I look into her eyes I see a soul in there. I see a little girl who will one day love, and regret, and rejoice. Life is good indeed, but creating life is a whole other ball game.

What happens to a nation with a two party system, where one of the parties moves away from rational policy and reverts to base gutteral emotion? What happens when that party’s leaders fall back on the rhetoric of hate, anger and bitterness rather than offering viable policy alternatives? And what happens when the mainstream media ideologically supports that party and therefore fails to provide any meaningful scrutiny of it?

You end up with a country with a two party system in name only. One party continues to be actively engaged in governance, while the other party moves further and further away from the playing field content to shout insults from the sidelines. Insults that simplify, easily assign blame, that are aided by hindsight and insulated from accountability while being cloaked with the impression that a utopic solution has been forgone.

Facilitated by an irresponsible media content to engage in agenda journalism we end up with political discourse of the rediculous. To be sure, the ruling party is making mistakes. Policies can be improved. Viable alternatives exist. But real solutions are lost in a discourse of the absurd.

We saw it happen in Iraq, and regrettably we are seeing it occur with Katrina. Healthy discourse, open, honest debate, and an objective media which holds both sides accountable in the process, are essential to a functioning democracy. At the moment it appears that America has none of these.

Lorie at PoliPundit notes that Katrina is the new Iraq. Couldn’t agree more. The most glaring example in my mind is the hindsight-aided blaming, which could be directed at everyone but is only directed at Bush. Everybody and their dog believed that Iraq possessed WMD’s prior to the war – the French, the Germans, the UN, Clinton, Kerry, most members of Congress and Senate (at least the ones that spoke on the subject) – they all made proclamations of Iraq’s WMD danger. But it was Bush, and Bush alone, that “lied” to the public.

Similarly, the possibility of cataclysmic consequences arising from a cat 4 or 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans given its low sea level has been known by local, state, and federal policy makers for much of the last century. Get that – three levels of government, and the various officials and policy makers over the last century who occupied those posts. But where is the finger being pointed by the MSM?

When the rescuing stops and the clean-up begins (which in my opinion is the appropriate time to start focusing efforts on how this could have happened) a sober assessment on preparedness will be required. It’s regrettable that the MSM’s agenda journalism will in many ways thwart this process by limiting the scrutiny to Bush and Bush alone. Not only is this an abuse of the media’s position as public informers, it will have real negative effects. Such politically driven scrutiny, rather than reality based scrutiny, will no doubt detract from efforts to improve the system going forward and may potentially cost lives in the future.

Still waiting for baby. Tons of contractions but still more waiting to go. I’ll keep you posted.

Regular Musers will know that my wife and I are expecting. It looks like her contractions have started (BTW I won’t actually be live blogging it, my wife would kill me – I just like the catchy title).

This whole birth thing is wild stuff!

If you want to get your info right from the horse’s mouth, here is a live feed from a local New Orleans station.

Just caught the latest MSM coverage of the Iraqi constitution. It appears that anything short of complete consensus among the stakeholders will be considered a failure. Jayson at PoliPundit provides an explicit example. Is the media setting unrealistic expectations so as to gaurantee any result a failure in Iraq (and therefore a failure of Bush’s policies)?

Here’s some perspective for you: Quebec did not sign onto the Canadian Charter/Constitution when it was repatriated from Britain in 1982. That’s right, Canada – a peaceful country with a stable economy and a couple of hundred years of representative democracy under its belt, was unable to obtain complete consensus among the country’s stakeholders. For those of you not up on Canadian federalism, Quebec is a culturally and linguistically distinct society within Canadian federation. Quebec was not, however, a ruling minority that ruled over the majority through a brutal totalitarian regime over the past half-century and which actively supported terrorist attacks leading up to the drafting of the Constitution. The Sunnis were.

Obtaining complete consensus on a constitutional framework among all the stakeholders in any pluralistic society is difficult if not impossible. Setting up an expectation of complete consensus among the various groups in Iraq, and particularily among the Sunni minority, given that country’s history, is not only unrealistic, it’s simply dishonest.

UPDATE: Here’s a short, simple primer on the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution and the previous and subsequent failed attempts at reaching a consensus.

Welcome PoliPundit readers! Please look around…

For months now the anti-war crowd has attempted to bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of being against the U.S. soldiers themselves. They believe that the troops are dying or getting injured in vain for an immoral imperialistic cause and occaisionally accuse them of committing autrocities, yet they attempt to shield themselves from the moral consequences of speaking out against men and women who volunteered to put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms by qualifying their protests with bare assertions of their support for the troops.

And how do they get around the logic of “supporting” troops who they accuse of killing innocent Iraqis? Simple, they are victims themselves: young, ignorant, innocent, dupes who bought into Bush’s lies.

The problem with taking such positions of convenience is that they are hard to sustain. It’s much easier to say what you truly believe, rather than relying on logical gymnastics to create the perception that you believe in something else. Eventually the logic collapses under the wieght of contrary conduct.

So when the protesters gathered this week at a veterans hospital and began harrassing the “victims” of Bush’s lies, and the families of those victims, who surely must also be victims themselves, all the while acknowledging that they would be causing further grief to these injured soldiers and their families, it wasn’t surprising in the least. The first thing that came to my mind was “what took them so long?” (H/T Michelle Malkin)

While the one sided coverage of Iraqi casualties continues, a lone voice in the MSM wilderness, Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune, writes an excellent piece about the media’s failure to inform and provide context on Iraq. While I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, check out her concluding line:

Our major media have a duty to give us the big picture on Iraq. This — not the tears of Crawford — is what we owe fallen soldiers and their courageous comrades.

It would be nice if this lone voice turned into a chorus, but I’m not holding my breath. (H/T Powerline)