The blogosphere proved its mettle quickly in the aftermath of Katrina: quickly identifying that the key news was the moral weakness of the New Orleans black underclass, facilitated by the failings of the black overclass in the form of the contemptable city government. Yes, suffering might have been relieved quicker by exceptionally talented Federal Action - but why was all this crime necessary?

The definitive statement on this matter is of course Jared Taylor's. He is clearing his bookshelf for his Pulitzer Prize, doubly warranted by his subsequently published The Color of Crime.(Some loyal VDARE.com supporters have e mailed to say Steve Sailer's comment was as good.)

Trolling around the internet today, however, I find another penetrating assessment, from National Review's John Derbyshire

At my neighbourhood block party... a white, liberal neighbour expressed the sense of national shame that we’d all felt at some point in Katrina Week. “It was like some Third World country!” he said. “Like Somalia, or Haiti…” The guy stopped dead in his tracks, suddenly aware of what he had implied, then desperately back-pedaled, trying to erase his thoughtcrime. “I mean, you know, Third World. Like, um, Cambodia…” Those of us listening nodded in sympathy, silently thinking: Nice save there, guy.

This can be read on Derbyshire's own site. It cannot be read, however, on NRO. I surmise this fiery, valiant, opponent of terror overseas flinched at naming the lesson of the most sustained outbreak of terror in this country in modern memory. This is that a temporary inability on the part of the authorities to maintain law and order + black underclass presence = trouble. Clearly this should be uppermost in the minds of law enforcement authorities constantly. Yet how can we expect this integrity when the allegedly "Conservative" establishment media lacks the courage to let even a columnist acknowledge that ethnic groups behave differently?

And this was the Goldwater champion!