Politicizing disaster relief

There is something particularly despicable about a politician trying to turn a natural disaster into a political argument. Governor Sebelius of Kansas had attempted to do this with the devastating tornado that wiped out the Kansas town of Greensburg. She soon went public complaining that the Iraq War had debilitated the Kansas National Guard to such an extent that they weren't able to respond properly to the tornado. Gateway Pundit has the full roundup of her remarks and the facts that prove her absolutely wrong.

One tornado victim who lost his house and four vehicles told the local news that, on the contrary, he and his family received wonderful assistance from neighboring towns and the National Guard. He wasn't impressed with the Governor's political opportunism.

While Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and the Bush administration jaw back-and-forth over the relief efforts for Greensburg, Kan., the town devastated by Friday night's F-5 tornado, town residents have chimed in and say they couldn't be any happier with the response from the government and other rescue units.

"The poor response thing is just political BS," Greensburg resident Mike Swigart, 47, who lost his house and four vehicles from the storm, told wcbstv.com in an exclusive interview. "I saw her on television and I'm disappointed in that because she doesn't know what she's talking about."

I suspect that the facts of the story won't matter to anyone. It will enter the political bloodstream as a liberal truth that the war prevented the National Guard from responding properly to Greensburg. The truth won't get in the way of political hit job. As the Investor's Business Daily points out, this is part of a pattern for the Democrats.

It's become a pattern: Democrats blaming President Bush for their own lack of disaster preparedness. Like Blanco in Katrina, Sebelius claims the federal response to the May 6 tornado that leveled the town of Greensburg was slow. She blames Bush's deployment of Kansas National Guardsmen in Iraq.

"States all over the country are not only missing personnel," she told CNN, "they don't have the equipment they need to come in. And it will just make it that much slower."

Fact is, she had 4,500 guard troops on call for this town of 1,600 if she needed them. She also had offers of help from other states for any resources Kansas asked for.

More than that, Kansas itself is full of resources — like farm equipment, along with private companies and citizen volunteers that can use them as effectively as any military equipment to clean up.

Worse, after Sebelius' loud complaints, it turned out she hadn't even asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help.

"If you don't request it," White House Spokesman Tony Snow noted, "you're not going to get it." That, by the way, is the law.

What Sebelius was really doing was resurrecting the bogus 2005 Katrina-era myth of an unresponsive federal government shunning a helpless disaster-struck community for no good reason.

Sebelius isn't alone. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Wednesday decried the 10,000 Greensburg tornado deaths. There were in fact 12 people killed. Never mind. An aide later called it a slip of the tongue, but the similarity to wildly overblown death estimates in New Orleans was unmistakable.

....Nor were the Kansas residents clamoring for aid. Self-reliance, it seems, is an antidote to political opportunism from demagogues who would turn everyone into a victim. These Kansans knew hay from political hay. Maybe it's time Sebelius did, too.