This just in; hurric…

This just in; hurricanes are no respecters of persons!

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city’s poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city’s poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.

“The fascinating thing is that it’s so spread out,” said Joachim Singelmann, director of the Louisiana Population Data Center at Louisiana State University. “It’s not just the Lower 9th Ward or New Orleans East, which everybody has heard about. It’s across the board, including some well-to-do neighborhoods.”

The “conventional wisdom” was only conventional among those ready to blame Bush for everything they could, including supposedly purposely destroying the levies. This was blatant exploitation of a tragedy for political gain that hit all economic levels.

Question: Will the same people that trumpeted the Katrina conventional “wisdom” as “proof” that Bush “hated” blacks recant and acknowledge that this new revelation, at the very least, says nothing about Bush’s racial views? I’d hope that it may even bring them to reconsider the whole presupposition that Bush is racist, and question previously accepted conventional wisdom. Will Kanye West apologize, even a little? I hope so, but my breath I holdeth not.

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