NY Times's Dowd Revels in New Orleans Fatalities

September 14th, 2005 1:49 AM

There were some gruesome findings yesterday in New Orleans.

Some were discovered in a hospital. Others in a nursing home.

Yet, this didn’t stop New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd from continuing her bitter evisceration of our president.

No, not a moment’s mourning for this crusader. Not a second to consider the innocents that were lost in these medical facilities, or the friends and family members who are grieving.

Instead, Ms. Dowd gets more and more vitriolic and venomous with each passing day. Just listen to her apparent glee as she announces the increase in the hurricane fatalities while linking responsibility to the White House:

“As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. ‘In effect,’ State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, ‘I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people.’

“President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.”

At an early age, most of us were taught to show respect for the dead and those who survive them. Why is America’s press ignoring this basic precept that most of us learned when we were in grammar school?