When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasted no time in penning an article that was posted on The Huffington Post. Without so much as a passing mention of the suffering of the people and what they might endure (the article was written after the storm initially hit, bypassing New Orleans and striking Mississippi the hardest), Kennedy launched into an attack on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Rightly or wrongly, he blamed Barbour for convincing George W. Bush to oppose mandatory caps for CO2 emissions when he, Barbour, was chairman of the Republic National Committee.
The article concludes by quoting Pat Robertson’s 1998 statement that hurricanes were likely to hit those places that offended God. Kennedy then speculated that perhaps the initial storm hit Mississippi the hardest to punish Barbour for the stance that he took on carbon dioxide emissions.
The piece revealed more about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. than it did about Haley Barbour or the environment. Kennedy shows that he doesn’t care about people; only his far left environmental ideology. Even if he was right about carbon dioxide emissions, people had died and were suffering because of the immediate effects of the storm, not the amount of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere. But Kennedy had no concern about them.
It should really come as no surprise that the majority of victims of Hurricane Katrina were poor and black; the people who RFK Jr. and his ilk claim to care so much about and whose children they claim to be protecting. What was really despicable was not what he wrote but the fact that he couldn’t even wait for the hurricane to end before spewing his theory that the storm’s wrath was the fault of the Governor of Mississippi.
It is also insightful to see how someone like Kennedy is so quick to quote someone like Pat Robertson, whom many on the religious right even shy away from because of his extreme views. But Kennedy was quick to quote the religious leader when it served his purpose.
It is difficult to believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes in the type of God that he wrote about; one who would direct hurricanes against thousands of innocent people simply because He doesn’t like their governor or his policies. But on the off chance that Kennedy does believe in this type of deity, perhaps he should consider the history of his own family before being so quick to say that God brought forth the hurricane to get back at Barbour.
Members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s family include:
Okay, so Uncle Teddy is still around and in his mid-70s. This merely shows that the God that intentionally punishes Haley Barbour is obviously not perfect. The fact that Ted Kennedy is still alive is not from a lack of trying. First there was the plane crash in which he miraculously escaped with a broken back. and then, of course there was Chappaquiddick. For a drunk, Teddy wasn’t a bad swimmer; who knew?
If God is such that Hurricane Katrina was created to wreak havoc on the state of Mississippi because of the past actions of Haley Barbour, then this same God sure don’t like the Kennedys much. Perhaps RFK Jr. should reflect upon how God feels about his family before speculating that He brought devastation to Mississippi because He disagreed with Barbour’s environmental policy.
Kennedy’s post on Huffington was the clearest and most egregious example of playing politics with the storm that caused so much devastation and human suffering. But the lives of ordinary people; babies, the poor, the elderly and the sick, don’t mean much to Bobby Jr. Not when there are Republicans to criticize and planets to save.