I just find it amusing that the same folks who will gladly drag out the 9/11 attacks to justify anything this Administration does is denouncing the Bush critics for “politicizing” the Katrina aftermath. Just more IOKIYAAR at work.
Dud!. Its been 3 days and the “aftermath” isnt’ realized enough to “politicize” it. The fact that I have to point that out to you isn’t amusing. It’s sad.
Don’t worry, guys. Bush is coordinating a trip to see the devastated area! Doesn’t that make you feel better? He says, already, from up in an airplane it looks bloody awful and it’s – he guesses – heck! – TWICE as bad to actually be on the ground.
No. You have proven that a PBS station in Teas has a copy of an article with a WND copyright in which the author condemns America.
There is no signature on the piece and no provenance in the KACV site. This could very easily have been an Op-Ed piece produced for WND by a contributor which they aired as an example of editorial openness of peieces with which they did not (completely) agree.
I would agree that WND has aired similar essays and that there are probably members of the WND staff who wholeheartedly agree with the piece, but we do not yet have evidence that the essay containing the offending phrase was written by a WND staff member, much less that it reflected the editorial opinion of that particular entity.
Mind you, I do not find WND to be a responsible source of journalism on most occasions, generally playing up only one side of disputes with Fundamenatlist Christians in a very slanted manner. However, we have a way to go before we can judge this particular piece as represenative of WND opinions.
Your claim that they “praise[d] the act of terrorism” is also not born out by any comment in that article. The author claimed that it was a necessary wake up call to Christian America (very much in keeping with WND rhetoric) but went on to say that the terrorists are burning in hell.
Having read more about the situation, I think criticism of the Bush administration may be completely fair this time.
From what I understand, a breach of the levee system in New Orleans has been tagged for a long time as one of the three largest possible disasters that could happen in the U.S. Given that, it seems outrageous that there wouldn’t be firm disaster plans set up to deal with this, or that shoring up the levee wouldn’t have been a priority for homeland security. Instead, the budget gets cut? I’ll be the first guy to be careful about assigning blame in hindsight, but in this case the risk looks large and was well known long in advance of this disaster.
But the blame goes further. Why in hell didn’t New Orleans or the state of Louisiana have a disaster plan for this? Why is relief so slow in coming? Who in hell set up the byzantine districting plans for the levees that make it impossible to coordinate disaster and recovery plans?
This is a balls-up of the biggest order, and there’s blame to be shared all the way from the lowest levels of state government all the way to the White House.
This would be a good question to ask Bush (found on another web site):
“Mr. President, let’s say that the levee was breached not by a hurricane, but by a terrorist attack. How would you rate the performance of the municipal, county, state, and federal government so far? Is this your model for how to handle an attack of this magnitude?”
Why in hell aren’t the flooded streets of that city jammed with boats right now pulling people to safety? Why haven’t buses been commandeered throughout the state to remove survivors? There should be a line of buses stretched out to as far as you can see from the Superdome, taking people out. It would have taken someone a couple of hours to prepare leaflets and order a mass printing to be dropped by airplane, showing safe routes out of the city and at least telling people that help is on the way. Why hasn’t that been done?
When the mandatory evac order was given, why weren’t buses with bullhorns driving through the poor neighborhoods collecting people? Why was there no plan for evacuating hospitals and nursing homes? It’s baffling. And didn’t the evac order come rather late anyway?
You’d think that of all the cities in North America, New Orleans would be well prepared for a flood. You’d think that a primary job of the city and state governments would be to plan for disasters like this and prepare for contingencies.
If need be, couldn’t the government snap up every inflatable raft in the state and drop them to survivors if they can’t be airlifted out, along with instructions for how to get out of the city? Or even drop rafts filled with bottles of fresh water? Why haven’t volunteers been solicited for putting together survival packs for air drop? It’s baffling to me that nothing like this is being done.
I’ve heard that Louisiana politics is corrupt and full of featherbedding and useless people. Maybe this total cock-up of a rescue plan is in part due to that? I don’t know, but from what I’ve seen, this recovery and rescue op is pretty lousy.
What I can’t fathom is how we can sit at home and see the suffering on the freeways and the convention center for the past 3 days, and all of a sudden today the FEMA head said on television that he just found out about it and ordered help to go there now. If the TV crews can get to the suffering, why can’t a water truck? It’s so hard to understand where are the water trucks- you’ve got infants dying of thirst and in this nation you can’t get the water to them? And it isn’t just in New Orleans. In southern Mississippi, why can’t there be some tents set up for these poor people to live in? At least there you can get to them easily. Can tents only be erected in Iraq and not Mississippi? This whole effort seems as pitifully messed up as could be. You can’t blame Bush for all of this, but he did appoint inexperienced people at the head of FEMA. He did cut money for levees. And, just like the tsunami, he seemed unable at first to grasp the gravity of the situation. There’s enough blame to go around, the state government of Louisiana should get some, the city of New Orleans, but in my opinion the “go to” power is the federal government and their response seems to be ineffective and untimely.
Excellent post, Sam. Thank you for being able to modify your viewpoint based on additional information. That is becoming a very rare attribute these days.
I too applaud your latest post, Sam. Indeed, there is a lot of blame to go around. For example, until this tragedy, I was truly ignorant of the fact that New Orleans was mainly below sea level and that the levies were only designed to handle a Category 3 storm. But, surely there are people in positions who are paid to know these things and ought to be either figuring out how to fix up the levies to be able to handle a scenario we knew was bound to happen eventually and/or have a realistic plan in place to do an orderly and complete evacuation of the city in less than 24 hours.
I remember reading about the 6000 people killed in Galveston a century ago and thinking, “Boy, we are fortunate that with all our forecasting technology and better construction and better planning, etc., etc, something of that scale could never happen today in our country.” Now it seems that New Orleans will indeed be at least on the scale of the Galveston disaster.
I started a parallel thread in GQ to ask some of the questions to try and get to the bottom of who is to blame if anyone is interested. I know that, for myself, I’m still pretty unsure who, if anyone, is at the bottom of the blame tree.
Anyway, feel free to join in with whatever factual data you have, even reposted stuff from this thread if I missed the answers here to any of my questions.
-XT
Three-Mile Island?
I hate to burst your bunyon, but the Three-Mile Island nuclear emergency caused us to consume more greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuel, not less.
After Three-Mile Island, no new nuclear power plants were built in the United States. Oil, coal, and natural gas powered power plants were built instead. These fossil-fuel-powered plants increased our dependence on foreign petroleum and foreign natural gas, put more smog-producing pollutants into the air, and ultimately put more CO2 into the air, too.
If anything, the “no nukes” crowd shares just as much of the blame for global warming as the people they despise.
I dunno, I dislike Bush as much as most anyone, but I’d lay most of the blame with regards to lack of preparedness, etc, on the heads of state and local governments. My one brush with a major natural disaster was the Red River flood of '97. You may recall pictures of downtown East Grand Forks under water and on fire. I was in Winnipeg, and the way the situation was handled throughout Manitoba was about as textbook perfect as you could hope to see. A lot of farms were submerged, but no major centres and only one small town were flooded out, and this was far and away the worst flood of the century. And why did everything go so smoothly? Well, in part of course because the Red doesn’t sneak up on you. It was known some weeks in advance what was coming. But that is only a small part of the answer. The big part is that after the Red flooded in 1950 and left a quarter of Winnipeg homeless, the provincial and municipal governments said ‘Enough!’ and built a giant-ass floodway around the city, enabling a massive amount of water to be diverted from the flow in the city itself. In addition, towns in the Red’s floodplain were required to build ring dykes, and rural building codes required houses to be elevated (with the result that a lot of farmhouses in southern Manitoba are sitting on substantial sized artificial hills). When a flood much larger than the 1950 flood came along, there were a few weeks of sandbagging, but the entire episode went off in an extremely orderly fashion.
And it was all about the local governments having spent the time to figure out what contingency plans to make and what preparations to have made long beforehand in order to avoid being caught with their pants down, like they were in 1950. You can’t rely on the feds to take care of disaster preparedness like this. Some of this stuff regarding FEMA and the US Army Corps of Engineers looks a little fishy, but I’ll give Bush a pass on most of that. It’s the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana (and their predecessors) that should have been ready, regardless of how much the feds had ignored things.
I suspect that you are not aware that nothing involving hydrology happens without the direct involvement of the Corps of Engineers particularly in the Mississippi basin.
Given that the local people were directly looking for specific assistance with the levees–assistance that was cut–I’d say that there was rather little that the local folks could do in terms of raising the city. They already had the equivalent of ring dykes–as designed, approved, and implemented by the Corps, which has veto power over anyone else’s efforts.
Now, if you want to blame human nature for trying to build a major city on a sinking substrate, and then trying to protect it rather than abandon it to nature after it was built up, you can make a point. However, trying to absolve Bush by laying the blame on people whose hands were tied regarding what they were allowed to do while Bush actually cut the support that everyone agreed was needed sounds more like rationalization than justification.
Seriously? That’s just…bizarre. I thought y’all were all about decentralized government down there.
You’re right, that does change my assessment to a degree. But only a degree. The problems I’m seeing look to extend far beyond broken levees to a broad lack of planning and preparedness.
Except isn’t it the job of FEMA to make sure these preparations are adequate, and to add in plans of their own for managing disasters like this? Jesus, the U.S. is spending about 30 billion a year on homeland security. This is the best they can do?
If the U.S. government doesn’t have a list of the 100 top potential disasters, both natural and terrorist-related, and have a thick disaster preparedness manual written for each one of them, then they aren’t doing their job. Hell, I spent several months doing one for our office. If disaster strikes, we’ll have our offsite backups, we drill for egress from the high rise, we have meeting points outside the building and plans for evacuating the area, etc. We put a lot of this in place after 9/11, when our noses were rubbed up against our own vulnerability.
I mean, we’re not talking about unforseen events were. We’re talking about basic things like, “If we have to evacuate the city, how do we clear the hospitals, nursing homes, retirement homes, and the poor who don’t have cars?” I can’t believe any major city hasn’t worked this out, let alone the biggest flood-risk city in the country. It’s astounding.
And the politicians have been abysmal, with the exception of Haley Barbour, who seems to really have stepped up to the plate. The governor of Louisiana alternates between giving a deer-in-the-headlights look and breaking down on camera. Bush’s comments yesterday were defeatist and vague.
Where’s Guliani when you need him?
Oh, I agree. It looks so far as I can tell that they simply had no plan for what to do if the levees broke. That is absolutely a complete failure of government (at whatever level) to do its job. One of government’s primary responsibilities is to protect us collectively from things we simply aren’t capable of handling individually. This is obviously one of those things. I just think that responsibility for these sorts of things starts at the bottom. Your office building didn’t sit around waiting for Ann McClellan to come by with a set of contingency plans for various problems, did it? No, it did not. The Army Corps of Engineers didn’t have the funding to prepare adequate levees? That’s bad, absolutely, and part of the blame there lies with the feds. But that the municipal and state governments had no plan to maintain order if a below-sealevel city flooded? That’s not the feds’ fault at all.
I agree that there is a vast amount of responsibility that must be taken. For instance, I have not been watching the television news coverage, but I think it’s safe to say that I haven’t missed the line of city buses trying, even if it were in vain, to help relieve the situation of masses of people. Where would they take them? Perhaps they should have planned for that beforehand.
However, even from a coldly, callous political point of view, it is difficult to fathom how Bush would have been unprepared for this very type of incident. His own father arguably paid a political price for the failings of FEMA and the associated suffering of local and state agencies in the wake of hurricane Andrew. The contrast between the two Bushes and the Clinton management of FEMA could not be more stark. Even if he didn’t really care about minimizing the suffering of people in the wake of a disaster, surely he could have calculated his own risk of such a collosal screw up.
What risk? In the next couple of days, Sean Hannity will prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the materials intended to shore up the levees were expropriated by Bill Clinton for his cocaine-smuggling airstrip in Arkansas.
Bet me.
When the canary dies and the order for action is not given, everybody dies. Simultaneously at fault and inescapably a victim is the negligible who ignores.
Maybe self preservation and personal interest will finally motivate Bush … it always has.
But we started paying attention to the safety problems posed by nuke plants because of Three-Mile Island, which you apparently don’t think exists, DESPITE Three-Mile Island (won’t mention Chernobyl here, as they used a nuke plant design not in use in the US). Who knows what horrible disaster we averted by doing so.
I’m amenable to nuke plants as long as the watchword is “safety first” in constructing and running them. In the past, it clearly was not.