Profiting from Katrina

Common sense that money will be made off of Katrina. Clean-up and restoration companies will make money, construction companies will make money. Last week the press harrumphed with moral outrage – or something – and announced Bush friends were the profiteers.

Companies with ties to the Bush White House and the former head of FEMA are clinching some of the administration’s first disaster relief and reconstruction contracts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At least two major corporate clients of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush’s former campaign manager and a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have already been tapped to start recovery work along the battered Gulf Coast.

One is Shaw Group Inc. and the other is Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Vice President Dick Cheney is a former head of Halliburton.

Oh, no! This is indecent! But let’s allow Michelle Malkin to tell it:

But in their zeal to embarrass the Bush administration, CNN overlooks one very fat and inconvenient fact–and embarrasses only itself.

The Shaw Group, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, is headed by Jim Bernhard, the current chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. Bernhard worked tirelessly for Democrat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s runoff campaign and served as co-chair of her transition team. Another Shaw executive was Blanco’s campaign manager. Bernhard is back-scratching chums with Blanco, whom he has lent/offered the Shaw Group’s corporate jets to on numerous occasions.

So, why was none of this mentioned in CNN’s Bush-profiteers-are-evil narrative?

Ooooooh, Oooooh! Can I answer, Michelle? Is it because the press has decided over this past year or so that it will not report on anything that happens in the whole wide world without blaming Bush, and that any story which might reflect badly on a Democrat is ignored, or “framed” so that things only reflect badly on Bush? That’s it, isn’t it?

Well, that explains a lot!

Michelle says CNN is not the only culprit – that Fortunately for CNN, they weren’t the only ones guilty of this glaring omission:

UPI failed to note that the CEO of the Shaw Group also happens to be the Louisiana Democratic Party chairman and beleaguered La. Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s most influential crony. So did the London Observer. And Reuters/MSNBC. And the CBC. And the NYTimes (reprinted in the Minnesota Star Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Scotsman, and scores of media outlets around the world).

Jeff Goldstein has put together a very fine fisking that demostrates to us – very clearly – that the Fourth Estate in America…is fallen and lost. They have (with pitifully few exceptions) reduced themselves to PLAYACTING and STORYTELLING as opposed to REPORTING.

This open letter imagines what the MSM would have done had President Kerry been in office and a Republican Governor and Mayor had performed as Nagin and Blanco did. Sadly, the press will not read it, and if they did, they’d either sneer or simply not comprehend it.