Democratic Natural Disasters v. Republican Responsibility

The level of fatalities from Hurricane Katrina is, predictably (and thankfully), turning out to be much lower than the doomsayers in the media predicted, less than 600 so far in New Orleans where the media had touted figures like 10,000 or more. To put that in the proper perspective, more than 700 died in Chicago's great heat wave in 1995.

Isn't it just possible that, contrary to everything we've heard, at least some people did a whole lot right in reacting to the hurricane? Shouldn't someone get credit for the number of people who didn't die but who were plucked from the rooftops of flooded homes or picked up by the Coast Guard?

In 1995, you had in Chicago a city that wasn't flooded, where the roads weren't impassable, where there wasn't toxic waste and oil spills everywhere, where there weren't (at least as I can recall it) reports of random shooting at rescue vehicles, where the local police did not "retire" en masse. If New Orleans 2005 was a bureaucratic fiasco where we have to find someone in the federal government to blame and have to have independent bipartisan commissions (read: "witch hunts"), why wasn't Chicago the same? Ah, but you know the answer: in 1995 you had a Democratic President, Bill Clinton.

The reality, of course, is that Clinton was no more to blame than President Bush is now. Things happen and people may die -- heat or hurricanes are acts of God -- and sometimes no one is to blame. The difference is the shallow partisanship of the mainstream media.