Whoa!

I thought I was reading something out of the Weekly Standard in reference to the San Diego wildfires. While the folks at the Washington Post didn't give Bush credit for how the fires have been handled, they didn't bash him either.

Some will be tempted to attribute the quick action exclusively to race. After all, San Diego County, where most of the more than 800,000 wildfire evacuees live, is predominantly white (66 percent) and well-to-do (9 percent poverty rate) compared to the mostly African American (67 percent) and poor (28 percent poverty rate) victims of New Orleans. But that would be simplistic.

Because of well-organized disaster preparedness planning at the state and regional levels and drills that are continually performed, California is considered the gold standard of emergency response. After devastating fires in 2003, San Diego County invested in the automated reverse 911 system, which this week urged San Diego County residents to evacuate. And Californians have something that Louisianans, in particular those in New Orleans, didn't have when they needed it most: leadership, in this case from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the San Diego mayor on down. That there have been just five fatalities in an inferno that has burned an area twice the size of New York City shows what can result from clear and coordinated leadership.

Armageddon is surely upon us.