The Shame of Blaming the Victims

By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet. Posted September 16, 2005.

Talk about a flip-flop. Last year progressives were berated for embracing the "Anybody But Bush" philosophy; these days, after Bush's miserable failure of leadership leading up to and during the Katrina catastrophe, the right-wing opinion machine is a true aficionado of the ABB philosophy -- so long as it's Anybody But Bush accepting the blame for his failures.

Right-wing pundits and bloggers have sought to keep things neatly partisan and make the "blame game" a fight between local Democratic officials and federal Republicans. Now, however, many are giving in to the irresistible temptation to find even smaller, more powerless victims: the ordinary people of New Orleans who suffered the most.

In pursuit of this goal, characterizations of the citizens of New Orleans have been rapidly evolving as the punditry searches for just the right race-tinged label that will stick to them and take the blame off Bush. Here's a basic timeline of this evolution.

The early days when looting was the real problem

In the early days when it became clear that, like some bizarro King Midas, Bush was going to screw up yet again, the right-wing punditry ducked into spin mode. Blaming the victim is par for the course, but given the severity and immediacy of the situation, the right wing punditry resorted to the comfortable, if unsophisticated, racist stereotype of the hurricane victims as a bunch of criminals and gangsters, out trying to steal from the white man.

True to reputation, Michelle Malkin was first out of the racist rumor-mongering box, starting a long blog post on August 30 detailing every rumor or semi-news item that portrayed Katrina's victims as a crowd intent on stealing, rioting and killing. Having established to her own satisfaction that the chaos in New Orleans was due to criminality more than anything, she followed up with an August 31 post wondering if "law and order" could be restored -- clearly more worried about a few criminals getting away something than for the immediate safety of the victims themselves.

With the news media and right wing bloggers already excited about the looting, Peggy Noonan just couldn't contain herself, openly fantasizing about shooting looters on sight -- without specifying just who and what constitutes a "looter" of course. Uncharitable readers of Noonan's fantasy suggested that "looters" was code for anyone black and carrying something, though Noonan tried to make it clear that a looter should be defined only as someone carrying something expensive. Although the national disgrace was already apparent, Noonan chose to focus on looters rather than on the fact that thousands of people were stuck in a hellhole with no immediate relief or escape. But that sort of thing isn't important until we deal with the disgrace that is a few stolen TV sets.

The looting narrative reached its climax with Rich Lowry's article chastising the entire population of New Orleans for the crimes of the few, turning it into a moral lesson on how the government has no business helping until black people who take stuff that may or may not belong to white people cease to do so. Indeed, we can rest assured that the people suffering from dehydration and degradation in the Superdome and Convention Center while waiting for government help that seemed like it would never come would surely understand Lowry's point -- indeed, how could they be helped when there were TVs out there in grave danger of being stolen?

Phase II: Don't call us racist! We want to help the hustle the survivors out of town, after all

P.C. liberals are such whiners. Just because right wing pundits tried to distract from Bush's failures during Hurricane Katrina by drumming up wild fantasies about getting all vigilante on some poor black people, it doesn't make them racist. Not in the slightest. In fact, they're quite eager to demonstrate how they're going to help the largely black and impoverished population of New Orleans that had to be evacuated in total chaos, by helping relieve them of their land so that it can be developed for wealthier folks. That way they don't have to worry their heads about ever coming home again.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon.

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