It Was a Good Year for Wine/Whine, Though

Instapundit posts his thoughts on Jonah Goldberg's NRO article regarding the outright lies, falsehoods, and mendacious twitterings that escaped mostly unchallenged from the press in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of New Orleans related to the failing levees, and the failure to properly evacuate the city as was strongly suggested by the federal government, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The foreign press coverage angered me more than the domestic. There was this one punk from the BBC, who if I had recognized him in a pub here in Santa Monica, I probably would have thrashed him but good.

Europe (and the American Left) has used these events to reinforce their dim view of America in general, and its built on falsehoods.

I can't but help think of the disaster that befell Europe a few years earlier, that received comparatively scant coverage here, and has lead to far less hand-wringing than Katrina related events.

The August 2003 heatwave across much of Europe killed an estimated 50,000 mostly elderly people. Compare that to the 1500 or so dead from Katrina. They are very different kinds of disasters. But deaths caused by both were largely avoidable, and hit the elderly overwhelmingly. I wonder if any cynical person has compared healthcare costs before and after 2003 to see if La France saw a big dip in its medical bills when it let so many elderly and chronically ill perish. Remember those events when crying for socialized medicine here in the States.

And the title of this post? Well, the heatwave produced one of the best Beaujolais in memory.

And Katrina produced the best year in memory for the domestic media for Whine, and they've been riding this constant shrill Whine for all its worth.