"Only the best for New Orleans"

I didn’t want to rush to conclusions, because the article doesn’t make the context of the quote very clear–as you pointed out.. Still I found the timing a little suspicious. Even though Nagin is much closer to Bush than Landrieu and Jakson is Bush’s HUD secretary, anything that makes race more of an issue potentially helps Nagin. Not that the White House has any love for Nagin (they’ll scapegoat him in a heartbeat), but they’d much rather have an N.O. mayor who criticizes Baton Rouge than one who might criticize Washington. I’m probably falling into the liberal trap of seeing the “evil genius” of Karl Rove everywhere, still it struck that an impolitic statement by a Bush official could help Nagin.

This was unfortunate. I was planning on writing about it today, but have simply got to get packed to move. I’ve procrastinated long enough.
In a nutshell, though, my problems with all of this, are as usual, that it’s all so circular. I agree with you re:disabled, etc. all being lumped into the undesirable category. That is absurd. But my problem is bigger than that.
Here on my block there is a house filled with poor, uneducated, utterly ignorant people. The family is a mess. It’s impossible to figure out who is grandma, who is who’s child, and the kids keep coming. (For the record, this family is white.) There is trash everywhere around their house and the boys are well known in the neighborhood as bike thieves. Piles of bike parts everywhere (including one of mine!) The cops have bigger fish to fry apparently, and so nothing has been done and this situation was here before Katrina.
Some in the neighborhood want to petition the landlord to have these people removed from their dwelling. It’s an eyesore and there are the theft problems. And the babies, in diapers, no shoes, walking in streets that have glass, nails, you name it. Horrendous.
A group of us discussed this one night. The petition was brought up. I listened and understood where the neighbors were coming from, but my question was and remains, where are these people to GO? Do we just pawn them off on the next neighborhood? Do we send them to Houston? Do we bring back Dickensian work houses? Maybe put them all in prison? Yes, each of those thoughts got progressively more severe. Poli, you and I have had this discussion in the past and we still don’t have the real answer.
Criminals, undereducated, under the poverty line, addicted. People fitting one or more of these categories will always exist, and they will always exist no matter what city they’re in. There is no realistic, enforcable way to keep them out of New Orleans. No, we don’t have to abdicate the city to them either, but pawning them off on the next block, the next neighborhood, the next social infrastructure isn’t fixing the problem.
This man’s statement was bizarre and divisive. If this kind of rhetoric continues here, it will only make matters worse, in my opinion. The “undesirables” will never just disappear off the face of the earth, maybe out of our earshot or sight line, but they’ll still be somewhere. Comments like this don’t address any of the underlying problems that cause this situation to begin with, and that only fuels more resentment from all sides.
I wish he’d kept his mouth shut.