Repudiate Ben Stein\’s Rhetoric
Ben Stein has taken a break from murmuring (in a hilarious deadpan monotone) sweet nothings to the life-size oil portrait of Dubya over his mantelpiece to write a grocery list whiny “Special Report” for The American Spectator insisting that Bush not only did everything humanly possible to help the Gulf coast from the very moment he first heard about hurricane Katrina, but he is also not responsible for absolutely anything at all, anywhere, ever.
Wait, these statements I’m making are unfair and untrue? How do you know? Probably because I, y’know, gave you a link to Ben’s piece so you could read it for yourself. And yet, in Ben’s piece, he addresses a number of issues that, apparently, he thought up himself, since he provides no attribution.
George Bush did not cause the hurricane.
Who said he did? I read the blogs of a good number of people whose views are largely anti-Bush, and yet I haven’t seen a single person claim that Bush caused the hurricane. So where did he get this from? (I’m not even going to respond to the rest of the straw men in his piece.)
It’s not George Bush’s fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans. His job description does not include making sure every adult in America has a car, is in good health, has good sense, and is mobile.
Funny, I thought the job of the President encompassed exactly that sort of thing: decrease the number of citizens living in poverty, provide better health care, and provide better education. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he’s doing very well.
George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over.
Leaving aside the fact that Ben Stein apparently thinks he can read Bush’s mind and, uh, see his soul… least racist President ever? That’s quite a claim to make. Perhaps he has appointed more racially diverse staff members than other Presidents, but that only shows that he knows how to make politically expedient appointments. I’m not saying he is racist, just that we can’t possibly know.
George Bush is rushing every bit of help he can to New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama as soon as he can. He is not a magician. It takes time to organize huge convoys of food and now they are starting to arrive.
You mean the same time it takes to play guitar at a Naval base and share a cake with John McCain? It took 5 days for the first federal response to begin for a disaster that has already cost thousands of lives and will probably cost thousands more. For comparison, the entire Senate reconvened in the middle of a vacation, introduced and passed a bill, and Bush signed it into law, in only three days when one woman in a persistent vegetative state was possibly going to be disconnected from life support.
There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency.
Clever of him to limit this statement to the response only. No, the response hasn’t been diminished. However, even Ben doesn’t try and deny that the preparation for the disaster was dreadfully underfunded due to the cost of the Iraq War.
Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed [New Orleans' recovery] process by one day.
The two things — criticizing the President and helping the entire affected area recover — are not mutually exclusive activities. The criticism that I and many others are levelling at Bush is meant to help prevent a similar terrible situation in the future, by helping people realize that Bush’s policies are leaving everything but the military underfunded and in less than capable hands. It’s perfectly possible to support the recovery effort while criticising the President, just as it’s possible to support the troops in Iraq while still thinking the Iraq War is wrong.
Imagine if Hillary Clinton had gotten her way and they were in charge of your health care.
Yeah, if we had a government-run national health care system, we might be in a terrible situation just like France.
Why is it that the snipers who shot at emergency rescuers trying to save people in hospitals and shelters are never mentioned except in passing, and Mr. Bush, who is turning over heaven and earth to rescue the victims of the storm, is endlessly vilified?
Because the snipers are lunatics in control of a single rifle, while Bush is a lunatic in control of the richest, strongest country and government on the planet. If those snipers shoot, it could end a few lives. If Bush doesn’t respond to a national crisis for five days, it could end thousands of lives. Criticising the snipers will just make people upset, but won’t have any effect on those snipers. Criticising the President may help things change for the better, since politicians tend to respond to criticism if it’s loud enough.
What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government of New Orleans for the aftereffects of Katrina?
The same ability you have, Ben.
If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?
It takes more than an able body to move out of the pathway of a hurricane. If you lived in the middle of New Orleans and had no car, and the buses and other public transportation wasn’t running, could you make it out, on foot, in time, possibly with small children in tow?
Where did the idea come from that salvation comes from hatred and criticism and mockery instead of love and co-operation?
Again, criticising the President’s past and present decisions about disaster management doesn’t detract from our ability to care about and assist the victims of this tragedy, and both of these things will, in the end, make America a better, stronger, safer place to live.
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Ryan, straw men are easy to construct. But even by that standard, Stein did a mediocre job.
“It’s not George Bush’s fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans. His job description does not include making sure every adult in America has a car, is in good health, has good sense, and is mobile.”
No, it’s not. However, it is the responsibility of government officials at all levels that a proper emergency plan be developed. A proper emergency plan must obviously take into account those who are sick, old and of limited mobility.
“There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency.”
As I noted in my blog, thousands of National Guardsmen from Mississippi and Louisiana are in Iraq right now. Perhaps even more critically, so is their equipment. Where was all the NG’s equipment for feeding and housing large numbers of people? Where was all their water purification equipment? Their electricity generators? Their transport aircraft? Those things were in the Gulf, just the wrong Gulf. 30% (in people, not even counting equipment) of the Louisiana National Guard is in Iraq right now. ’30% less’ constitutes ‘diminished’ in my book. And I don’t think you need a math degree to know this.
“Imagine if Hillary Clinton had gotten her way and they were in charge of your health care.”
You knew that Bill and/or Hillary Clinton would be invoked in some way by the right.
“What special abilities does the media have for deciding how much blame goes to the federal government as opposed to the city government of New Orleans for the aftereffects of Katrina?”
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Unfortunately, some people reflexively proffer knee jerk defenses of the president against any and every criticism, no matter how mild. The president was responsible for tying the hands of state officials by sending 30% of their National Guard and who knows how much of their equipment to fight a foreign excursion. Since the president was responsible for diminishing the capacity of state and local officials to act on their own, he had an obligation to provide help much more quickly than he did.
“If able-bodied people refuse to obey a mandatory evacuation order for a city, have they not assumed the risk that ill effects will happen to them?”
What about able-bodied people without private transportation? If they did not have or were not offered the means to leave, then their decision to stay was not voluntary.
“Where did the idea come from that salvation comes from hatred and criticism and mockery instead of love and co-operation?”
Maybe from witnessing this administration for the last 4 1/2 years.
“There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency.”
If this is the case, then why did the administration submit a request to NATO asking for military equipment and other assistance?
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050909/wl_afp/usweathernato_050909160044
Ooh, good point. Thanks for the link.
“Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed [New Orleans’ recovery] process by one day.”
Upon further reflection, even this statement has been shown to be incorrect. Bush sat on his thumbs for days. It wasn’t until huge public criticism (the much derided ‘blame game’) shamed him into doing something vaguely resembling leadership.
Brian,
It seems pretty clear now that Nearly everything Ben wrote was just a kneejerk “how dare you criticize our leader?” reaction, and not really based on reality at all. Unfortunately, it seems like a large (but shrinking!) number of the people in this country have this same reaction.
Why does it take huge, devastating disasters like Katrina to wake people up to the fact that Bush and his corrupt, cronyist administration are unfit to lead even a Boy Scout troop, much less the most powerful country on earth? Why must people inevitably forget so many of the lessons they’ve learned about the current pathetic Republican leadership by the time elections come around?
Nice response. I find it hard to believe that someone as knowledgeable as Ben Stein has drunk the GWB kool-aid. Granted, being good at trivia doesn’t equal having wisdom, but it’s clear that Stein reads more in a week than shrub does in a year. How can we explain Stein’s stance: it’s not simply sycophantic spin, but a delirious fantasy that is the opposite of the facts? I can think of 2 possibilites: 1. Stein has some deep-seated emotional problems which are finding expression in his arational championing of an incompetent, lying, ignorant, war-mongering, cowardly baboon’s ass of a president. 2. Stein has vested financial interests in keeping the baboon’s ass in power. I’d say it’s either #2 or a combination of #1 and #2.
Alberto,
Sadly, Ben Stein has always been a pretty outspoken conservative, and it’s disgusting to watch him blindly follow the Republican talking points when it’s obvious that he’s smart enough to see through them if he’d just take a minute to really think about things.