THE CLUELESS HISTORIAN

Celebrity faux historian Doug Brinkley needs to stick to glossing up John Kerry's past. He has no, and I mean no, grasp on the present:

"If you had to say one line about this, this whole hurricane is about racism. I think if you go to the Astrodome like I've been or if you go to any of the evacuation centers you are going to see the divide between African American community and others. The fact that the Bush administration seem in my mind to behave as if the underclass or as Michael Herrington use to call it, the other America, the poor, the disenfranchised, those without a lot, those that when a hurricane is announced and they are told to evacuate they try to say, how can I evacuate? I don't have a car. I don't own any other way of mode to get out and I'm scared to get put into some bus, leave my animals and money behind.

"...scared to get put into some bus..." So that's the lefty line now? People didn't leave because they were scared to get put into some bus? The only problem with that line of thinking is that they never even had the opportunity to get scared to get put into some bus. The mayor never ordered them into service.

These are, by the way, the very same buses parents put their kids on every morning in sending them to school. I'd think the least likely reaction to seeing a bus bumping down the street with an evacuation order in your mind and a storm on the horizon would be to fear the bus. You'd see it as a saviour, if you had the chance to see it at all. A chance the residents of New Orleans never had. How clueless can a historian be?

The quote is from Imus this morning. Both Imus the Ignoramus and Brinkley agreed that the hurricane was a racist, that Bush is a racist, that the whole country except the people who didn't fire up the buses and the woman who kept the Red Cross from feeding the poor in the dome are all racists. Nagin, Ebbert and Blanco, architects of death on a grand scale, get a pass. The rest of us get whacked.

And Mother Nature has come out of the closet as a Grand Wizard in the KKK. I guess she replaced Bobby Byrd.

(thanks to Sally and friends)

UPDATE: Brinkley is even more clueless than I'd thought.

Another city resident, the historian Douglas Brinkley, remained in New Orleans during the storm. "I was in a building that was built to withstand this type of storm and didn't heed the first notice to evacuate."

A Cat 5 is bearing down on a city that clearly isn't ready for it, and he stays behind. Reader Ward wonders whether the fear of getting put on buses during the mythical bus-borne evac was Brinkley committing a gaffee--accidentally telling the truth. Perhaps, wonders Ward, Brinkley mentally bridged that sentence "...with those poor people." It would then read: "I don't own any other way of mode to get out and I'm scared to get put into some bus...with those poor people...leave my animals and money behind."

I won't even pretend to crawl inside Brinkley's head and speak for him. But that is just about the only way his sentence makes any sense at all.

Whether that was Brinkley's own fear finding voice or not, he did manage to make some sense eventually:

The core problem here is there has been no person in charge. In New York after 9/11 you had Rudy Giuliani, who had strong leadership. I don't think New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has provided that."

That's correct.