MSNBC ran a ticker headline Friday identifying dead bodies, debris, human waste and chemicals as prominent contents of the toxic flood waters. It’s no surprise, and curiously fitting, that the national media all week has been awash with the cultural equivalent: noxious, vile proclamations by the America’s foremost moral pretenders, atrocity addicts, all-purpose grifters and incendiary race hustlers: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, and Maxine Waters — with auditions from aspiring race-mongering demagogues Kanye West and Michael Eric Dyson.

Each of these self-congratulatory progressive activists has labored to exploit the New Orleans catastrophe as an onslaught against black America. Collectively they possess moral authority equivalent to the two scammers who used an amputated finger in an attempted shakedown of Wendys. Let’s be clear about the lineage these bottom feeders are part of. The opportunistic race-based ghouls who have made New Orleans their haunt are not different from David Duke, in either kind or degree. The activists now working overtime to incite race hatred — doing so in the name of “justice” and “civil rights” — deserve the same accolades and mantles as the klansmen who terrorized blacks, Jews, Catholics, and white civil rights workers in another decade.

Like the vulgar, hate-driven white racists who read aloud from Bibles in church the morning after lynching, burning and raping, these morally bankrupt representatives of today’s civil rights elite represent the last gasp of a morally unregenerate worldview. And like the Klan of yore, they (and their enablers Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Richard Cohen, and Hillary Clinton) grow more desperate and deranged as the moderate American mainstream rejects their quest to rip open the nation’s past racial wounds for temporary partisan advantage.

Efforts to turn New Orleans into the cultural equivalent of Rwanda are repugnant to everything about America than makes moral sense. Lincoln spoke of the better angels of human nature, implying the existence of something very much worse. Every schoolboy knows the proper counterpart is demon. The moral scammers now inciting race hatred in the wake of the Louisiana nightmare will fail. And the movement they represent will ultimately fail, because it is more than wrong or simply false, it is cancerously self-canceling. The body politic will cast off this disease and will do so to preserve its well being, vitality, and wholeness.

But the end of this fight is not near. The mainstream media is highlighting the preposterous claims of America’s hate apostles because the MSM sees an opportunity not simply to negate the past two presidential elections, but to reverse the general trend away from the cultural corrections (anti-welfare state, pro-national defense) that Reagan’s 1980 victory represented. The American left has been licking its chops for years, hoping for the political equivalent of a perfect storm: the ideal convergence of forces that would yield a return to normalcy for expanding the gutter of identity politics and apologizing to the world at large for everything American. The left longs for a return of Carter’s malaise because that will reinforce the left’s longstanding antagonism toward the resurgence of personal responsibility and national pride since 9-11.

The unconscionable quest to exploit the human misery of New Orleans sickens me more than I can say. I was with my family at a Florida hospice, attending to my mother as she lay dying from cancer, when Katrina came ashore, wreaking human and physical loss only miles away. We were all aware that our personal loss would be shared by many hurricane victims, and that the American people would do what we always do: rally to help the wounded, the sick, and the bereaved. It never occurred to us — not even remotely — on August 25, the day mom passed away, that leaders of this nation’s so-called progressive community would even consider using a natural tragedy as an occasion to further their now familiar By Any Means Necessary campaign against this country and its traditions.

Then again, neither did I expect that there would be 250 demonstrations on American campuses against the United States responding militarily to the September 11 attacks, as David Horowitz has so aptly described. Naïvete dies hard, but there’s a positive side. It’s extremely hard to resuscitate.