The most deadly threat faced by the United States is not killer hurricanes. It is not even the jihadists who want to harm us with the best weapons petrodollars can buy. Our worst threat comes from within, as is nearly always the case when a nation or a person accumulates extraordinary wealth and power, and is therefore able to practice folly on the grandest scale.

Michael Barone has some astonishing facts in his current US News & World Report column:

——— "A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi—hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity."

——— " This is, astoundingly, standard operating procedure at FEMA. And in other parts of the federal government."

——— "Former CIA agent Robert Baer writes in his recent book how in Central Asia he asked headquarters to send someone who spoke Afghan languages, and Langley offered to send a four—member sexual harassment team instead."

Sexual harassment has now turned into a ball and chain for our military, our police, and even for the rescuers in New Orleans. Looney—tunes Political Correctness is not the only culprit in the Hurricane Katrina response, but it looks like one of the biggest.

It's been killing us for years.

PC made 9/11 possible. I'm sorry, but it's true. Political Correctness made it a venal sin to raise the alarm when Mohammed Atta was identified as the likely leader of a murderous Al Qaeda cell in 1999, two years before 9/11. This was six years after the 1993 attempt to blow up the Twin Towers the first time around.

PC erected Jamie Gorelick's infamous legal Wall between the FBI, CIA and DOD, so that Mohammed Atta, identified by the Able Danger group, had to be erased from the record. You see,  he was in the country legally, and the Department of Defense is not supposed to engage in domestic law enforcement. It was PC that  blinded us to the hijackers who killed 3,000 innocent people four years ago.

PC kept CNN from showing the death jumpers from the burning Twin Towers, for fear of enraging the American people and making them feel angry at Muslims. But just a few days ago, Political Correctness made in necessary for CNN to get a court order allowing it to televise the bloated bodies of the children and elderly African Americans who drowned in New Orleans. To teach the American people a lesson, in living color.

PC made Hazel O'Leary prohibit color—coded security badges at the Energy Department during the Clinton years, because NOBODY should ever have a better color badge than anybody else. The Energy Department is in charge of our nuclear weapons labs, like Los Alamos, where security became a bad joke when PC took over. Hazel O'Leary should have become a laughing stock, but she is probably thriving somewhere, spreading the virus.

While the Energy Department couldn't protect our nuclear secrets because of PC, Political Correctness made it just fine to sell national security secrets to China. After all, it would be racist to discriminate against China, and they deserve missiles that work just as well as American missiles.

PC made the Clinton Administration treat Osama Bin Laden with great regard for his civil rights. So in spite of multiple offers from the Sudan, the Clintonites could never decide what to do with Osama on a platter.

PC has kept the liberal media from telling the truth about all the ills that the Left has inflicted on us with for decades, from the lies about heterosexual AIDS thirty years ago to the breakdown of the Black family under the tender mercies of the welfare state.

The problem is that lies kill, and Politically Correct lies are practically tailor—made to kill. If the voters of New Orleans had not been lied to year after year, they would have demanded that money be spent on levees. It's not that they lacked the will to live. They were just the latest victims of Politically Correct lies ——— by the media, by the educrats of a disastrous school system, and yes, by all the Mayor Nagins and all the Governor Blancos, all the Clintons and the Carters. All the folks who don't think that telling the truth matters a lot.

When people have been suckered long enough, they start to think the truth—tellers are out to kill them. A lot of Black people in this country are convinced that George Bush hates Black people, and that he somehow made those levees fail. Go ask Condi Rice about that.

Bush's disregard for PC might be the biggest reason why the Left hates him so ferociously. He just doesn't believe it. Neither do most of the American people.

Hurricane Katrina will not be the last great threat in the life of this country.  If disaster comes knocking at your door, just forget Political Correctness. The life you save may be your own.