By Scott Wright

I was sitting at my desk Thursday afternoon trying to figure out a way to express my disgust with the situation in New Orleans and along the U.S. Gulf Coast when someone was kind enough to forward to me an article written by actor, columnist and conservative yahoo Ben Stein. Yeah, that Ben Stein -- the vapid, monotone-speaking non-comedian from the intolerable ex-game show “Win Ben Stein's Money.”

Stein fired off a 12-part tirade on Sept. 4 that essentially aspired to wash away any blame the Bush administration might accrue from the tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina. Most of Stein's column is drivel of the highest order, but I thought his rant might give me a solid foundation to work from. I found that it did, indeed. Here's the column he wrote a couple weeks ago, with my reply to each of his GOP-generated talking points.

1.) The hurricane that hit New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama was an astonishing tragedy.

REPLY: No argument there. Stein started off sensibly enough, I thought.

2.) George Bush did not cause the hurricane.

REPLY: Say what? This statement is straight out of the Sean Hannity playbook: accuse someone else of accusing the Bush administration of doing something ridiculous, then turn around and accuse them of being ridiculous for accusing them of committing the ridiculous act to begin with. Totally ridiculous.

3.) George Bush did not make this hurricane worse than others.

REPLY: I'm not sure about the planet of origin of the news broadcasts Mr. Stein has been watching, but I've heard absolutely no one -- not even Howard Dean -- accuse the president of contacting Pat Robertson in the hours before Katrina struck to see if he could have the Big Guy Upstairs “ratchet her up a notch or two.” However, based on the fact that Robertson has recently prayed for the death of Supreme Court justices and called for the assassination of the president of Venezuela, I'm sure he would have been more than willing to oblige such a request.

4.) There is no overwhelming evidence that global warming exists as a man-made phenomenon. There is no clear-cut evidence that global warming even exists. There is no clear evidence that if it does exist it makes hurricanes more powerful or makes them aim at cities with large numbers of poor people. If global warming is a real phenomenon, which it may well be, it started long before George Bush was inaugurated, and would not have been affected at all by the Kyoto treaty, considering that Kyoto does not cover the world's worst polluters -- China, India, and Brazil. In a word, George Bush had zero to do with causing this hurricane. To speculate otherwise is belief in sorcery.

REPLY: Well, first of all, Mr. Stein contradicts himself in No. 4. He says there is no clear-cut evidence global warming even exists, then two sentences later torpedoes himself with the line “If global warming is a real phenomenon, which it may well be …” Hell, I not even going to have to argue with this nut. He's doing my work for me.

5.) George Bush had nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans for New Orleans. Those are drawn up by New Orleans and Louisiana. In any event, the plans were perfectly good: mandatory evacuation. It is in no way at all George Bush's fault that about 20 percent of New Orleans neglected to follow the plan. It's not George Bush's fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans.

REPLY: Correct, Mr. Stein. You finally got one right without having to argue with yourself. It is true that Bush had absolutely nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans in New Orleans. And those plans were botched, to a significant degree, before the envelope was ever opened because plans were not made to get everyone out in the event of a hurricane massive enough to breach the levee system surrounding the city. That's certainly the fault of local and state officials. But obviously the local and state governments don't have access to hundreds of helicopters, thousands of volunteers and emergency relief workers, and tons upon tons of humanitarian supplies. And when the federal government saw their levee system begin to consume the city, along with the local officials working in it, they should have stepped in right away. And they did not do that.

Here's the crux of my argument: there is a federal agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, that is in charge of maintaining that levee system. The men and women of the Corps of Engineers answer to the president of the United States. Not the mayor of New Orleans, not the governor of Louisiana, the president. People who work for President Bush are responsible for maintaining those levees and they knew the levee system would not sustain the rising waters brought on by a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. And we know that word of this information never got into the space between Bush's ears -- or maybe it did and just didn't have anything to latch on to -- because Bush said in a TV interview on Aug. 31 that he didn't think anyone foresaw the breach of the levees. Well, that statement means the president is either an idiot or a liar, because a whole ferry load of people who work for him have known that for years. And I believe it is fair to say that, to a significant extent, the state and local governments had the situation under control until the levees broke. At that point, the problem in New Orleans became the federal government's problem and because they responded so miserably a lot of people died who didn't have to. Someone has to answer for that.

6.) George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons. In short, he did not make New Orleans into a living hell.

REPLY: No argument there. I totally agree there is no excuse for how those people behaved. But I believe there is a reason for it, and so does former Sec. of State Colin Powell.

Here's what he had to say about the situation in New Orleans last Friday night during an ABC News interview with Barbara Walters: “When you look at those who weren't able to get out, it should have been a blinding flash of the obvious to everybody that when you order a mandatory evacuation, you can't expect everybody to evacuate on their own. These are people who don't have credit cards; only one in 10 families at that economic level in New Orleans have a car. So it wasn't a racial thing but poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor."

7.) George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over.

REPLY: Of course the president is not a racist. I totally agree with that. But distinctively conservative policies such as axing social services to the nation's poor in order to give rich folks a tax cut and working hand-in-hand with billion dollar-earning big drug companies to cram a faulty, overpriced a prescription drug (non) benefit down the throats of elderly Americans are choices that don't make the president seem very sensitive to the poor, either.

8.) George Bush is rushing every bit of help he can to New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama as soon as he can. He is not a magician. It takes time to organize huge convoys of food and now they are starting to arrive.

REPLY: I absolutely agree that massive amounts of humanitarian aid, food, clothing, water and necessities are either in or on their way to the Gulf Coast NOW. No one disputes that, and we're all grateful and thankful to the people who are making it happen. The problem is that for five days, there wasn't any of this sustenance getting to the people. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Mike Brown, ousted head of an Arabian horse association, didn't even know there were thousands of people stranded in the Morial Convention Center in downtown New Orleans until NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told him so during a live TV interview. That's the main reason you don't see him on TV anymore, although the White House insists he's just too busy to talk. Trust me, folks. He's holding an empty cardboard box at the base of a stairwell somewhere, waiting for the security escort so he can go up and clean out his desk.

At least, that's where he ought to be, because FEMA is the agency responsible for handling huge national emergencies. They have been preparing for just this type of catastrophic event for four years now and they still botched their portion of this response horribly! And a lot of people believe rightly, in my opinion that a major portion of the reason for FEMA's failure is because President Bush has, according to an editorial in USA Today on Sept. 8, “replaced competent FEMA leaders with people long on political connections but short on disaster management experience.” Whose fault can is that if it isn't George Bush's?

9.) There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency. To say otherwise is pure slander.

REPLY: Agreed. I've seen no evidence of that. As I already stated, it was Bush's choice to replace competent leaders with political cronies that diminished the government's response to this particular emergency.

10.) If the energy the news media puts into blaming Bush for an Act of God worsened by stupendous incompetence by the New Orleans city authorities and the malevolence of the criminals of the city were directed to helping the morale of the nation, we would all be a lot better off.

REPLY: There's plenty of stupendous incompetence to go around Mr. Stein, don't you worry. Mayor Nagin and Gov. Blanco will get theirs. You wild-eyed conservatives out there will see to that, especially since you control both houses of Congress and have already decided to conduct an internal investigation. Like Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid said, though, it's going to be kind of like “a pitcher calling his own balls and strikes.” Given that, it's going to take a lot of voices like mine to make sure Dubya gets the portion of blame what's coming his way for the Buckner-like errors he has made in the months and years leading up to the Katrina disaster that began on Aug. 29 and continues to this day for hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans.

11.) New Orleans is a great city with many great people. It will recover and be greater than ever. Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed the process by one day.

REPLY: It is my fervent hope that New Orleans will indeed recover. I believe it will, too, unless House Republican Tom DeLay figures out a way to make a buck selling $10 boat rides through the flooded-out Superdome parking lot or pocket a few dollars per head for shipping all those thousands of homeless people off to Indonesia to work in the sweatshop of one of his mysterious, overseas campaign donors. Hey folks, I'm not making that up. Read a book called “The Hammer,” by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid. There's a copy in the Cherokee County Public Library that I donated myself.

12.) The entire episode is a dramatic lesson in the breathtaking callousness of government officials at the ground level.

REPLY: How about ALL levels, Mr. Stein local , state and federal? I can accept the reality that there's plenty of blame to go around. Why can't you? The president and all his myopic defenders are certainly going to have to accept that fact sooner or later.

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.