Year In Review - The Top 15 Newsmakers of 2005 - #2

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in August and September this year was indescribable.

Katrina opened up a hard and intense debate which involved not only political figures but celebs and the media as well. For the Administration, President Bush embarassingly told Michael Brown, former horse show guru and head of FEMA, that he was doing a "hell of a job" when he clearly wasn't. Lower levels of government were even more incoherent in both preventing the disaster and responding to it. Gov. Mary Landreu (D) was completely out of the loop and New Orleans Governor Ray Nagin (D) seemed to point fingers at anyone he possibly could to escape blame. Even the media, which bit on stories of sexual assault at the Superdome, had egg on its face because that, and many other stories, were found to be simply untrue.

Nevertheless, the whole thing forced America to ask itself some hard questions about race, poverty and the ability of emergency responders to get the job done more than 4 years after 9/11. In the face of charges from the likes of rapper Kanye West that "George Bush hates black people", in late September, the President outlined a number of serious and imaginative proposals designed to foster entrepreneurship in the Deep South to get the region back on its feet.

The only people who came out of the whole debacle looking halfway decent were former Presidents Bush and Clinton who came together to form a relief fund, as well as the many volunteers from across North America (but especially in Houston, TX) who pitched in to help out.

It would be nice to think that Katrina caused governments all over North America to learn their lessons about priorities. Here in Canada, however, we are having an election debate which is largely about who is proposing the best government-funded babysitting program.

Sigh.