In Which A Parish Priest Discovers Why the Left Hates Bush so Much

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On Friday James Robbins proved the notion that Iraq has depleted us of National Guard ridiculous. Read it here. He ends by reminding us that when Charley hit, Bush was accused of responding too quickly to curry favor with FL voters. I'd totally forgotten about that, but he's right, and gives us the link.
In case you missed it, here too is James Glassman's fisking of the idea that global warming caused Katrina. I've been aware of it for days but just got around to reading it (I didn't need persuading on this point, but it's nice to see it laid out).
Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s,4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.
We were at a wedding most of the day, and it so happened th homilist was the priest who celebrated our own wedding mass. We were talking with him about the suffering of the victims in NO. This man, whose entire priesthood has been among the urban poor, is really aching for the people he sees on tv, because they remind him of his own parishioners. His comment: see how expensive it is to be poor? Those who couldn't leave lost everything they had; the ones who evacuated largely have other resources to draw from.
Be that as it may, he is amused by the idea that Bush could have prevented the hurricane. We were chuckling because some while back the chattering classes were mocking Pat Robertson for praying that an approaching hurricane would divert its path and go elsewhere. They mocked Robertson for that, but they think Bush's signature on the Kyoto treaty would have diverted Katrina. "They seem to think he's God," says I.
"Now I understand why they're always so angry at Bush," said Fr. "They think he's God and they're really, really mad at God."