It’s time for a reality check.

If you do a Google search for “New Orleans Crime Rate,” the first news story that will appear is an Associated Press story from August 18, 2005, entitled “New Orleans Murder Rate on the Rise Again.” This story, which ran 11 days before Katrina, reported on the eye-popping 265 murders committed in 2004. The article also pointed out that in 1994 the city experienced 421 homicides.

I didn’t do very well in math, but 265 and 421 sound like a higher number of killings than last year’s 162. Or even this year’s 163.

The hard truth is that New Orleans has always been crime-infested. There is no connection between Hurricane Katrina and crime. That’s just part of a touchy-feely narrative that is supposed to make us think that anything wrong with New Orleans has to be as a result of Hurricane Katrina. It’s an extension of the bald-faced lie that the Bush Administration purposefully ignored the plight of the city after the floodwaters hit.

If anything, many of the criminals who called New Orleans home have invaded other parts of the country after evacuating and are now perpetrating felonies on unsuspecting victims in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and all over the United States.

Ann Coulter likes to expose the liberals’ “doctrine of infallibility,” where certain sympathetic figures (9/11 victims, war heroes) can become activists and no one is allowed to challenge or criticize them because of their victimhood. The same thing is happening with New Orleans. We’re expected to keep National Guard troops there to help the police officers do their jobs as if Hurricane Katrina turned a paradise like New Orleans into a crime-ridden cesspool.

I hate to burst the bubble of people who like to romanticize New Orleans. But the decadence, danger and filth in New Orleans were there well before Hurricane Katrina ever came ashore.