aamusedinatx | Discrimination in hurricane response?

(09-12) 12:04 PDT NEW ORLEANS, (AP) --

President Bush denied Monday there was any racial component to people being left behind after Hurricane Katrina, despite suggestions from some critics that the response would have been quicker if so many of the victims hadn't been poor and black.

"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said. "The rescue efforts were comprehensive. The recovery will be comprehensive."

Similar articles to this one appear all over the news today.

This may come as as surprise to some of you but...I think that:

1. That is the best sound bite quote from Shrub in 7 years.

2. I believe him.

WHAT?!!

Hear me out. The response to Katrina, or lack thereof, throughout the Gulf States, not just New Orleans, is not due to a racial bias...it is due to an economic one. It is our National problem that the have-nots, which increase by leaps and bounds as our economic gap continues to widen, is dominated by one race, however, it is not exclusively Black Americans who reside in that lower tier of economically marginalized society of America.

Hello...

I do too, for one thing.

For another thing the fact that we do not take into account the severely limited resources and means of those folks as pie-in-the-sky city/state/federal planners create scenarios and draft unrealistic evacuation plans is a situation that has needed addressing for generations.

Read the history of the dustbowl devastation of the 1930s, or of the floods all over this country in the past century and the TVA project in Tennessee and Ohio valleys. The marginalized will always be further marginalized in natural and man-made crises where geography, land ownership, and homesteading is involved.

Playing the race card is all too easy in this case. ECONOMICS is the issue, Race is a factor...to me there's a big difference.

But that's just me.