Wednesday, January 13, 2010

The Real Problem With Haiti

As BooMan points out, the real disaster in Haiti is the fact that while in the case of New Orleans and Katrina, there was still then entire rest of the US that pitched in to help.  Haiti on the other hand doesn't exactly have a prosperous economy.  Not the kind that can rebuild an entire country, basically.

The cost will be astronomical.  And a disaster of this magnitude in the new global economy is only the beginning.

New tag, as I foresee a lot of posts on it:  Haiti.

[UPDATE 8:05 PM] And we have have out first Villager already saying that Obama is now on the hook politically for Haiti, via John Cole.  It should surprise a grand total of zero readers of this blog that the culprit is one Howard Fineman.
Elected in part out of revulsion at the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, Obama now finds himself confronting an even more devastating and complex humanitarian crisis.

And, adding irony upon irony, the racial context of New Orleans is writ large in Port-au-Prince. Katrina cost George W. Bush what little standing he had among moderates in his own party in part because the shocking images of suffering in New Orleans were so racially imbalanced.
To recap, Bush screwed up Katrina, therefore Obama has to work ten times as hard to fix Haiti (which is now our 53rd state next to Iraq and Afghanistan, apparently) or he's worse than Bush because it's proof that Obama doesn't care about black people and the Democrats will pay for it at the polls in November.

Gosh, it's almost like Fineman is buying into El Rushbo's theory that Obama is only helping Haiti to earn racial "credibility."  After all, Limbaugh is America's go-to expert on what African-Americans think about other African-Americans.

I wonder when anybody is going to ask President Harold Ford what Obama should do.

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