One of the biggest injustices ever done to the Bush Administration was the claim that the federal government abandoned the people of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

You know the narrative by now: angry liberals who have a contemptuous view of President Bush like to spin a yarn of a White House completely indifferent to the pain and loss of all those people left in Katrina’s wake. The more radical the storyteller, the more evil the behavior at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. becomes. New Orleans is a Democratic town, some say, so Bush was glad to have those folks wiped out. Or an even more asinine claim is that since so many Blacks live in New Orleans, the feds just didn’t care to save them.

It’s enough to make you heave.

But now, in October of 2007, comes a pretty extraordinary request from the Police Superintendent there, a guy named Warren Riley. It seems Mr. Riley appreciates the presence of hundreds of National Guard troops who have been patrolling the streets of the city since Katrina so much that he wants to keep them there – indefinitely.

Evidently, the Guard patrols the less populated areas of New Orleans so that the actual police officers can spend more time in the busier parts of the city. But in mid-January of 2008, the National Guard is finally scheduled to leave. Riley said, “I would like to see them stay, at least long enough for us to get one more group through the (Police) Academy,” he said.

Frankly, I had no idea that the National Guard has been functioning as an auxiliary police department in New Orleans for the past two years, did you?

But the fascinating part of this whole issue is the way the news media tries to connect the skyrocketing murder rates in New Orleans with a kind of post-Katrina syndrome. This week, the Associated Press reported that the city earned the title of murder capital of the nation in 2006 when 162 people were killed. Already this year, that number has been exceeded.

The truth of the matter is that Hurricane Katrina doesn’t have anything to do with the crime rate in New Orleans. Just like libs like to blame even the arrival of a hurricane on a Republican president (as if George Bush conjures up the weather from a mystical weather room near the Oval Office), the media is in love with trying to pin everything bad in New Orleans today on the 2005 hurricane. Continued...