Shame on the left (and Michael Moore) for bringing up race in the Katrina tragedy....

The disaster is bad enough without having to stir up racial anger.

Hurricane Katrina was barely beyond New Orleans and the Mississippi coast when the strident voices of the Angry Left began screaming that the death and destruction were the fault of President Bush, Gov. Haley Barbour and White America’s racism.

Disaster brings out the best and the worst in people and the former was vividly on display as helicopter crews bravely plucked desperate people from roofs, bus caravans ferried exhausted refugees to safe havens across the South and Americans everywhere began pouring out a veritable torrent of dollars to help the needy.

But that’s not what the Left wanted us to see.

For the editors of The Washington Post, for example, Katrina proved White America’s racism remains, creating in the storm’s aftermath “a mass of desperate-looking Black folk on the run in the Deep South. Some without shoes.” Such was the lead in a front-page story headlined “To Me, It Just Seems Like Black People Are Marked.”

Watching the stream of television images of refugees stranded in the Superdome and along stretches of Interstate 10, Post reporter Wil Haygood found “no escaping that race had become a subtext to the unfolding drama of the hurricane’s aftermath.”

No matter that the Black family Haygood profiled said they had been passed over by a helicopter from a “Black National Guard unit.” The incident demonstrated for Haygood that “in the South, the issue of race – black, white – always seems ready to come rolling off the tongue as a summer whistle.”

A similar obsession was evident in the Friday morning WTOP radio remarks of “Hardball” host Chris Matthews. The former flak for Jimmy Carter, Tip O’Neill and Ed Muskie said his weekend show would focus on Katrina and its aftermath: “It’s not a nice topic, it’s about race, you know, it’s about class, it’s about poverty, it’s about screw-ups, it’s not a happy topic.”