Claim: Canadian columnist David Warren penned article in support of President Bush's handling of Katrina disaster relief efforts.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2005]
There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I'm tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course — I am often pleased to discover things we still get right. But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you're in real trouble, that's where the adults live. And that isn't an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail. [Rest of article here.] |
Origins: The article cited above was indeed penned by Canadian journalist David Warren and published in the Ottawa Citizen on
Saturday.
The piece has received wide circulation in e-mail because the human tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans (the death toll in Louisiana stands at 964 as of
In such an emotionally charged environment, an article from a foreign publication that supports one theory of culpability and dismisses another is heady stuff. Because news pieces hailing from outside the U.S. are often perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being uninfluenced by
Barbara "I read it in a foreign newspaper, so it must be true" Mikkelson
Last updated: 4 October 2005
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