Bring THOSE Bodies Over A Little Closer

Glenn Reynolds made a great point yesterday:

The press wants to show bodies from Katrina. It didn't want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public.

I can only conclude that this time around, the press thinks it's a good thing to inflame the public. What could the difference be?

What, indeed. So extreme is this media grave-robbing compulsion that they're suing in order to force the military to turn over Katrina corpses for them to film in order to, in Scrappleface's parodous words, "s[how] the decaying flesh of each and every citizen who perished from lack of federal government assistance."

Perhaps another motivating factor is that rescuers are finding far fewer dead bodies than the hysterical estimates of 10,000 or more that have been, um, floating around for the past two weeks:

Authorities said the first street-by-street sweep of this swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than originally feared, a glimmer of encouraging news amid the toxic floodwaters.

The mayor and others had predicted up to 10,000 deaths, but that number appeared less likely after Friday's count, said retired Marine Colonel Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief.

"Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," Ebbert said.

He declined to give a revised estimate, but said: "Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000."

To any normal, reasonable, sane human being, this would be unqualified good news. A profound relief, even. But for left-wingnuts, it's terrible news, because, to put it bluntly, they need those towering mounds of corpses. Their irresponsible vituperations, of which loud touting of five-figure death estimates were a less than inconspicuous example, raised the stakes to their already-tattered credibility if the actual facts on the ground turned out to be substantially less than the Doomsday scenario they were slobberingly hoping for (so as to hang it all on George W. Bush, of course). If, as it looks like so far, the death toll ends up being ten- or twentyfold [or even fiftyfold] smaller after the size of Katrina, the magnitude of the disaster area (a swath the size of England) and the devastation within it, Democrats will not only look like total asses - again - but it can even be put over that FEMA, far from "bungling" the disaster relief effort, was instrumental in salvaging the utter fiasco created by the incompetent state and local governments.

The best way of averting that public relations debacle is to splash pictures of room-temperature New Orleansians all over front pages and network newscasts with luridly partisan headlines like "Victims of Hurricane W".

Hey, if a picture is worth a thousand words, each of these pictures must be worth a thousand cadavers, right?

Just goes to show anew that as the facts turn typically and inevitably against them, the Left will flog their Bushophobic meme all the harder, no matter how despicable it makes them look.

Looks to me like the Roberts confirmation hearings are coming just in the nick of time - in more ways than one.

UPDATE: Wow, look at this email to GR:

I think the difference lies in what they think an inflamed public might do.

In the case of 9/11, the elites in the media (who are so much more worldly than us folks in the masses, ya know) feared that an inflamed public might start burning Muslims at the stake. After all, all those Christian redneck hicks in the red states are just one step away from barbarians. And maybe they might even, I dunno, start a war or something, when what we need is to make apologies at the UN for our racist, imperialist past.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina, the elites in the media hope that an inflamed public might start burning Republican leaders at the stake. After all, the elites all know how easily the masses are manipulated. (What was that Gallup figure again? Only 13% blamed the President? Don't those masses understand that we're trying to manipulate them? I guess we'll just have to look for even MORE negative stories. Bodies! That's it: we need BODIES! Somebody dig up some bodies for us, right away!)

I hear a lot of folks in the media ask how this disaster is different from 9/11. I feel the answer is: the folks in the media. 9/11 happened to THEM: to their home town, and to people they knew. They saw it happen, and it was something too momentous and awful for business as usual. The time was too solemn for their usual agenda promotion and self promotion. It hit home, and they were shaken. They saw people, not stories and angles and opportunities.

But Hurricane Katrina? That only hit a bunch of poor black folks (in their racially divisive view - it's like they can't even see the white victims) down in a rural southern reddish-purple state, far from their day-to-day lives. It's not like it happened to anyone they knew, anyone who mattered to them. So that left them free to look for stories and angles and opportunities. And thus, they can pursue their ideological and professional agendas full bore.

The story coverage is different, because in their hearts, the media don't care about black people.

And if anyone in the media think that's an unfair, outrageous statement, I'll apologize on a case by case basis: any of them who condemned Kanye West's remarks can have an apology. The rest of them can go to hell.

I don't know - I think the emailer is being far too gracious....

[HT: Powerline]