by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, September 2, 2005 3:12 P.M. EDT

Is Katrina Racist?
Al Sharpton showed up on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" on MSNBC last night, and the pair sounded a theme that's becoming depressingly familiar in the effort to demagogue hurricane Katrina:

Olbermann: I actually heard a commentator this afternoon--it was that Limbaugh--suggest that the issue of class and race in those who were left behind in New Orleans was irrelevant, because, as he put it, those people were not forced to live there and they weren't bused into New Orleans.

And I was thinking, A, this guy is even more clueless than I thought he was, which is saying something. But, B, there are people who actually believe that. How do you respond to them? How do you explain to them what the truth is? . . .

Sharpton: . . . The real question is not only those that didn't get out. The question is why has it taken the government so long to get in. I feel that, if it was in another area, with another economic strata and racial makeup, that President Bush would have run out of Crawford a lot quicker and FEMA would have found its way in a lot sooner.

In truth, Katrina's devastation was spread out over a huge area, not just the city of New Orleans with its majority-black population. The Associated Press quotes Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who lists four suburban parishes that, along with Orleans Parish (which is coterminous with New Orleans) were hit hard enough to need "long-term rebuilding."

Here are the 2000 census's racial breakdowns of the populations of those five Louisiana parishes, along with Mississippi's coastal counties, which suffered a direct hit:

The New York Times notes that among those who lost homes in Mississippi were Rep. Gene Taylor, a Democrat, and Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican--both persons of pallor and neither one of whom can be called downtrodden. Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Kenner, La. (in Jefferson Parish), doesn't even know if his house is still standing. "Jefferson Parish as we knew it is gone forever," Reuters quotes parish president Aaron Broussard as saying.

Though Katrina is an equal-opportunity destroyer, the news media's coverage of the disaster has centered on the city of New Orleans--which is understandable, given that that is the center of the metropolis, that it is densely populated, and that it is 80% underwater. That means the faces of the suffering that we have seen have mostly been black ones. And so what? These are fellow human beings and fellow Americans; the color of their skin makes their misery no more or less heartbreaking, and their rescue no more or less urgent.

Yet two days ago, Jack Shafer of Slate complained that journalists were ignoring race: "In the their [sic] frenzy to beat freshness into the endless loops of disaster footage that have been running all day, broadcasters might have mentioned that nearly all the visible people left behind in New Orleans are of the black persuasion." Soon enough, CNN picked up the theme, followed today by the New York Times and USA Today.

This emphasis on race makes us very uneasy, and the opening paragraph of that USA Today editorial illustrates why:

Although TV correspondents covering Hurricane Katrina avoid commenting on the obvious, their cameras hold back nothing. The people who couldn't or wouldn't leave New Orleans are overwhelmingly poor and black. As are the looters.

Now, there are looters and there are looters. Many commentators have observed that stealing the necessities of life when there is no alternative is forgivable, even justifiable. But the same can't be said for using a disaster as an opportunity to filch luxury goods.

There also are reports of criminality that goes far beyond theft. "We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass tells the Associated Press. The Voice of America tells of "roving gangs of armed delinquents who are sometimes interfering with the relief operations." In one case, across the Mississippi in Gretna, "Tenet Healthcare Corp. asked Louisiana state police to help evacuate Meadowcrest Hospital after armed bandits attempted to hijack a truck carrying food, water and drugs in the predawn hours on Thursday," the Chicago Tribune reports.

Avarice and depravity are human failings, but our race-obsessed liberal friends may be contributing to the notion that they are racial ones.

The Case for Rebuilding
Yesterday we noted the case for pessimism about whether New Orleans can come back from the Katrina catastrophe. George Friedman of the Stratfor intelligence firm argues that it must:

The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. . . .

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. . . .

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Plenty of Troops
One of the myths the Angry Left has been peddling in the wake of Katrina is that there aren't enough National Guardsmen to deal with the disaster because they're all off in Iraq. National Review Online's James Robbins offers a dose of reality:

Take the Army for example. There are 1,012,000 soldiers on active duty, in the Reserves, or in the National Guard. Of them, 261,000 are deployed overseas in 120 countries. Iraq accounts for 103,000 soldiers, or 10.2 percent of the Army.

That's all? Yes, 10.2 percent. That datum is significant in itself, a good one to keep handy the next time someone talks about how our forces are stretched too thin, our troops are at the breaking point, and so forth. If you add in Afghanistan (15,000) and the support troops in Kuwait (10,000) you still only have 12.6 percent.

So where are the rest? 751,000 (74.2 percent) are in the U.S. About half are active duty, and half Guard and Reserve. The Guard is the real issue of course--the Left wants you to believe that the country has been denuded of its citizen soldiers, and that Louisiana has suffered inordinately because Guardsmen and women who would have been available to be mobilized by the state to stop looting and aid in reconstruction are instead risking their lives in Iraq.

Recall, too, that many of the same people who are now say the National Guard is too important to waste on American security overseas a year ago were insisting that George W. Bush was a bum for serving in the Texas Air National Guard while "war hero" John Kerry was in Vietnam.

Durbin's Curious Civil Rights Views
Sen. Dick Durbin, best known for likening American soldiers to Nazis, weighs in today with a Chicago Tribune op-ed in advance of the John Roberts hearings. Mostly it's liberal boilerplate, but one assertion got our attention: "Nowhere did the Constitution expressly give Congress the authority to pass the Civil Rights Act [of 1964]."

Really? What about the 14th Amendment? Here are the first and last sections of that amendment, which was ratified in 1868:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. . . . The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

We'd say that last clause authorized Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One could argue otherwise, on the ground that the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination in private commerce, goes further than the 14th Amendment, which mandates equal treatment by government. But we would counter that the system of Jim Crow segregation was so all-pervasive that federal intervention in private commerce was necessary to ensure the promise of the 14th Amendment--and that, even more clearly, the amendment grants Congress the discretion to determine that the Civil Rights Act was "appropriate legislation."

Does Durbin disagree? Does he really think that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an extraconstitutional exercise? Or is he making this argument in bad faith in order to render more palatable actions, such as the creation of a "right" to abortion, that plainly are extraconstitutional?

A New Twist on Evolution
"Theory: Mad Cow May Have Come From Humans"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 1

Sorry, Mom
"Researchers: Chimp Is Man's Closest Living Relative"--headline, Seattle Times, Sept. 1

'Slumps'
"The nation's unemployment rate dipped to a four-year low of 4.9 percent in August as companies added 169,000 jobs, a sign that the labor market continued to gain traction before Hurricane Katrina struck," the Associated Press reports.

But the AP's headline makes this sound like bad news: "Unemployment Rate Slumps to Four-Year Low." Some will say this reflects a bias against reporting good economic news, especially when a Republican is in the White House. But then again, maybe the AP just feels sorry for employers who'll be hit by higher labor costs.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Matthew Kerfoot, Ruth Papazian, David Bertaccini, Michael Segal, Marco Parillo, Joseph Lazauskas, C.E. Dobkin, William Willard, Heather Higgins, Jim Orheim, Ed Lasky, Pat Rowe, Ron Ackert, Peter Pullen, Kevin Patrick, John Allen, Scott Smith, Michael Hopkovitz, Samuel Berger, John Ford and Frank Fortin. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Even in America, civil order is more fragile than we think.
• Daniel Henninger: Once again, big public bureaucracies aren't up to the task.
• Manuel Miranda: Attorney General Gonzales offers Judge Roberts some bad advice.
• The Journal Editorial Report: Tune in this weekend for a discussion of Katrina's aftermath and education battles.

And on the Taste page:

• Review & Outlook: Disparaging human dignity is a beastly idea.
• Tony & Tacky: "Gangsta" politics in North Carolina; how wine causes smog.
• Tunku Varadarajan: In New Orleans, moral levees are inundated too.
• Mark Oppenheimer: Home-schoolers of all stripes find common ground in some good, old-fashioned books.
• Steven Weiss: Noah Feldman's puzzling compromise between religion and secularism.