600 is a tragedy, 10,000 is a statistic?

It's easy to discern from this blog that we're both sick and tired of hearing the Left use Hurricane Katrina as a political talking point. As we've shown, first response responsibility for disasters goes to the states and localities, and the reactions by Louisiana's political leaders were completely ineffective -- especially in comparison to the work in Mississippi and prior disaster management in Florida. Now Rick Perry, the Texas governor, is getting high marks for his management of the Hurricane Rita situation, as is Houston's Democrat mayor.

Ray Nagin is Louisiana's crazy uncle, political id, and exhibit 1 in any trial of the inefffectiveness of Louisiana's corrupt politicians. His estimate of 10,000 deaths from the Hurricane is likely to be 93-94% off, thankfully. And yet the Federal government is still being pilloried for being incompetent (which we noted has been debunked), and uncaring.

Somehow the liberals take delight in the fact that the Europeans were laughing at the US. That's stupid on two counts: the liberals' and the Euros'. Why? Four words: France, Summer of 2003. Mark Steyn explained this on August 23, 2003:

Jacques Chirac, en vacances just up the road from me in North Hatley, Quebec, took time out of his three-week holiday to issue a statement on events in Baghdad, where 20 people died on Tuesday. But he didn't bother to interrupt his vacation to issue a statement on events in France, where so many people have died, the funeral homes are standing room only and they're having to store bodies in the freezers at the fruit-and-veg markets. Now that his old pal and nuclear client has been removed from power, M Chirac is utterly irrelevant to the future of Iraq. But surely France still falls within his jurisdiction, doesn't it?

And where are the Red Cross and Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and all the other noisy humanitarians? If 10,000 Iraqis had died of dysentery on George W Bush's watch, you'd never hear the end of it. A few weeks back, with three fatal cases of cholera, the Humanitarian Lobby was already shrieking that we stood on the edge of a humanitarian catastrophe. France isn't on the edge, it's in the abyss. When I motored round Iraq a couple of months ago, the hospital wards were well below capacity. Yet in France the entire health system – or that percentage of it not spending August at the beach – is stretched beyond its limits (35 hours a week, 44 weeks a year). Why aren't Médecins Sans Frontières demanding to be allowed in to take over?

There's an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different disasters on American TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But 10,000 French can die, and even the French don't seem to care – or not too much, and not with any great urgency.

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In Paris this spring, a government official explained to me how Europeans had created a more civilised society than America - socialised healthcare, shorter work weeks, more holidays. We've just seen where that leads: gran'ma turned away from the hospital to die in an airless apartment because junior's sur la plage. M Chirac's somewhat tetchy suggestion that his people should rethink their attitude to the elderly was well taken. But Big Government inevitably diminishes its citizens' capacity to take responsibility, to the point where even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the state should do something about.