I will have plenty to say later on about the madness of the coverage and the political debate surrounding Hurricane Katrina and flood aid, but I won't be drawn into it now, not by ridiculous rappers who spew garbage on prime-time network TV nor by the asinine and biased reporting that presumes that the federal government has all responsibility for the citizens of a city, rather than the city itself or the state in which it resides. For now, we need to focus on the task at hand, which is to get food, water, and shelter for the victims of Katrina and start planning on how to pull New Orleans out of the muck, literally and figuratively.

Donate to Catholic Charities or another worthy organization. Volunteer your time and labor. Pray, pray, pray. Those activities provide positive and constructive methods of coping with the catastrophe and result in actual benefit for the people of New Orleans and Mississippi.

I'm starting a moratorium on debating the politics of the relief at Captain's Quarters for a fortnight. I hope my fellow bloggers will join me, on the right and the left. The links will still exist when two weeks have passed, and then we can all get down in the figurative mud and start slinging it back and forth. For right now, the entire exercise makes Americans look like snarling dogs when we should extend our hands to our brothers and sisters in need. It's dispiriting, it's demeaning, and it's too damned tiresome to pursue.

I plan on covering other stories in depth, and on Katrina I will continue to note progress and the remarkable stories of courage and hope as well as the difficult prognoses for recovery, but I'm waiting for a reasonable period to pass before assigning blame or defending others. By that time, we'll actually have the facts in front of us.

Any takers?

UPDATE: Okay, this is eerie. Hugh and I apparently had the same thought tonight, but he posted his first.

UPDATE II: Based on the e-mails I have received overnight about leaving the field exposed to the lunatics of the Left, I have reconsidered this approach, as Saturday's posts will show. I still wish we could put all this aside for two weeks while we focus on the critical tasks ahead of us, but unfortunately, that's not possible.

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» Hey, Katrina Crackpots, S.T.F.U. from Am I A Pundit Now?
I am saddened and disgusted by the knee-jerk carping in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Just disgusted. It is absolutely ghoulish to be flinging blame when the recovery has not even really begun yet. Of course radical Islamists see this storm as... [Read More]

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