Via the Power Line comes this damning essay from Nicole Gelinas at City Journal. She ends thusly:
Was this week’s looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans’ officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims—according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.When I made my typically oppressive and caucasoidal "law and order" arguments among my Leftist pals yesterday, to a person, they misunderstood my point: I don't care that someone steals a TV ---so long as such stupidity is punished by Darwinian death.
Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They’ve hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they’ve likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they’ve smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn’t destroy their homes and their livelihoods—fellow citizens did.
Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans—and to America.
As I have said many times before, those who do not accept the moral imperative of capital punishment are themselves complicit in the murders, rapes, and robberies that plague our society. There has to be something wrong with you to oppose justice for the irredeemable. Who are you trying to impress with your equanimity and infinite tolerance?
Exterminating this class of sociopaths who prey on us is a great benefit to the vast majority of law-abiding and decent Americans. Why isn't it done? Because of the political pressure applied by liberal wankers who do not accept certain moral imperatives.
There's no question who needs a good killing, except in the minds of the liberal media elites who cluck and moan about American barbarity while a great American city suffers unimaginably ---even at this very hour.