Hurricane Katrina: Robert Kennedy Says Bush and Barbour Caused it

Steve Yuhas

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is one of those talkers that some people pay attention to because he comes from the perpetually dysfunctional Kennedy clan. He and many in his family believe they know better than anyone else about how the rest of us should live our lives. He is also a radical environmentalist, until it comes to putting windmills off the coast of his family compound or selling off some of the houses, cars and planes that the Kennedy family uses to traverse the nation and the world. Today Kennedy must have been bored or realized that he needed some face time on talk shows because while people in the Gulf are still suffering he came out with the obtuse conclusion that people were responsible for Hurricane Katrina and not only that – he could name them: Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi and, who else, President Bush.

Today Kennedy wrote, “Our destructive addiction (to oil) has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”

Kennedy is either drunk, which is entirely possible given the Kennedy family’s love for booze, or has completely lost his grasp of reality, also entirely possible with the family history of rubber rooms, since both of his assumptions are more than untrue, but borderline reckless because some idiot might actually believe him.

His irrational explanation that not only people, but certain people, are to blame for a hurricane is to believe that his god, Mother Nature, is keeping track of American elections and the political process and waited until a Republican President was in office to hit a red state with a monster hurricane. Using his logic hurricanes never happened until America began using fossil fuels or invaded Iraq and only if the Kyoto protocols were adopted a few years ago – we would be off the hook.

All of that good Kennedy booze smuggling trust fund money gone to waste on an education that teaches a person to think in such an idiotic way. I wonder how Robert would explain earthquakes in blue states, but that is for another disaster another day.

Since America began keeping records, before we started using fossil fuels, hurricanes have hit the Gulf of Mexico and other coastal regions. Before we were America others took note of hurricanes and in June 1559 Tristan de Luna took two months to cross from Veracruz, Mexico to Pensacola, Florida (a trip that should have taken two weeks) because of multiple hurricanes. In 1806 when the Napoleonic Wars were raging a cease fire had to be called when hurricanes caused the fleets of France and Great Britain to dock in America to be repaired before the fighting could resume.

During our own Civil War in November 1861 the Union Army had to postpone the transport of troops to South Carolina because a hurricane stopped their crossing (Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, maybe it had to do with that). Indeed hurricanes are part of history – long before America decided against the Kyoto accords and long before Americans or anyone else discovered how to drill for it or use it for transportation.

Indeed the term hurricane probably comes from the ancient Myan Indians who had a special name for their god of storms that came from the Atlantic Ocean: Hurukan. So common were these storms in our history that every explorer in history has stories about them.

Kam-biu Liu, a geology professor at Louisiana State University believes that massive hurricanes regularly battered the Gulf Coast, the same region hit by Katrina, from 3,400 to 1,000 years ago (were there Republicans back then – oh wait – no there weren’t; I wonder which Kennedy god was upset then and at who). Liu proved his theory by finding “ocean sand in core samples from inland lakes” and dating those using typical geological standards.

There is not a credible scientist anywhere that will go on record to say that hurricanes are the creation of man or the result of our use of fossil fuel. Indeed, many argue that storms even more enormous and destructive than anything we’ve ever seen before were common place in our planet’s history.

Scientists call these storms “hypercanes” and it is premised upon the notion that when an asteroid hit the earth causing the extinction of the dinosaurs that the heat generated by that explosion caused ocean temperatures to reach about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Since hurricanes get their energy from warm water using simple math it is theorized that hurricane winds during that period in our history would have been about 700 miles per hour.

The fact that hurricanes have been around since the beginning of time and the fact that Robert Kennedy decided to blame Republicans (he forgot to mention that not a single Senator – not even the one in his family or party voted to pass Kyoto in the Senate) and America for a disaster when people are still walking through poisonous water to get to higher ground and being plucked off their roof tops by military helicopters is disgusting.

The fact that the blame America for everything crowd began when bodies were floating around New Orleans and people are facing what is America’s greatest natural disaster is bad enough, but to somehow connect the war in Iraq to the hurricane is equally absurd.

If the war in Iraq were for oil – wouldn’t we be taking some? If the war in Iraq were about oil why is the EPA loosening standards on gasoline because shortages are feared? If America wanted to simply take all of the oil in Iraq we could, but we are not a nation of takers – we are a nation of givers and that will show itself again as Americans dig into their pockets to help strangers in the Gulf Coast recover from a terrible storm.

Robert Kennedy is typical of the left – when all else fails and when the facts are not on your side – blame regular Americans. He, like so many in Hollywood and New York who heat and cool mansions, limousines and private planes with the exact same fossil fuels that they demand that regular Americans stop using to get to work and to do the same to their modest homes and coach class cabins on airliners are hypocrites of the worst kind: hypocrites with a media following.

As Robert Kennedy and the rest of the people who take the opportunity of a natural disaster of epic proportion to blame America for natural weather systems that have been worse and have been around almost as long as the earth itself, it is interesting to listen as Democrats do not distance themselves from it. Robert Kennedy blames America for every catastrophe on the planet and every catastrophe is somehow related to “global warming” – if that is true how did all of these weather systems and acts of nature happen in the past – before man?

If Robert Kennedy wants to live like a caveman he should give up the mansions, limousines and private planes and live in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan (I hear Osama bin Laden has a boarding house with rooms to rent) and if he wants to blame America and the war in Iraq for a hurricane he is able to do it because even hypocrites and idiots are allowed to speak in America.

But, for those who want science to prove that hurricanes have forever been battering our shores one need only look to it and realize that not only could Katrina have been worse, but worse has hit the exact same area long before man became the menace that Robert Kennedy believes us to be. He must be one unhappy man and I, for one, only wish he was in New Orleans today then; perhaps, he could live the way he wants the rest of us to live.

No water, no power, no shelter, no fossil fuels and no food, but limousines and private planes would have been on stand by to take any Kennedy to any one of their many estates powered by those evil fossil fuels.

So much for looking out for the little guy.
Steve Yuhas is a columnist and radio talk show host on KOGO

AM 600 based in San Diego. He may be reached at steve@steveyuhas.com or www.steveyuhas.com