Have they no sense of decency? (Criticising Bush for Katarina)

[Squink]

@Abbie Normal

The President should step forward and admit this was a total clusterfuck from the get go, and create a post-Katrina panel, who will fix the problems that caused this in the first place.

Sort of a reprise of the 9/11 commission? :dubious:

[The_Hamster_King]

@Abbie Normal

Now its time to get together so it does not happen again.

There’s bipartisan support for impeachment then?

[MovieMogul]

This was e-mailed to Andrew Sullivan’s site and I thought was worth posting (excerpted):

"I’ve considered myself a socially libertarian, fiscally conservative Republican for a very long time. I got along with the idea that I wasn’t going to get a whole lot of help. College wouldn’t be free. Job training would cost money and time. And I’m probably a decent example of up-from-not-much.

But after watching what’s happening in New Orleans-an American city that I’ve loved, visited and have always wanted to return to - I can’t ever vote for these people again.

Being a Republican means that you expect the government to do just a couple things for you and nothing else. Build a road. Defend us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Stuff that would be a lot less organized if we all had to do it ourselves. Everything else is just gravy.

And as we poured money into Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I thought, “Right on,” because some of that money’s bound to fall on my head.

Well, something else would fall on my head first.

I work for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. And that means that if something really catastrophic happens in MY city, and they ask me to stick around, that’s the job. We have A and B teams and I’m a disaster recovery specialist on Team A. I’ve drawn up plans with names like Drawbridge and Smoldering Crater.

Here’s what these people would do for me.

They would leave me there to die.

Look at the facts. There’s no coordination on the ground right now. The city has no fresh water, no electricity, no services. The floodwater has so much oil and toxins in it that it’s flammable…

…We have known that this sort of disaster could occur for a century. Hell, the tour bus driver told me about it on the plantation tour. This means that we have been able to envision the stark reality of this occurring for a week-the newspapers all said the storm would hit New Orleans last Thursday.

A week to get buses? A week to get fishing boats? Trucks? This is the United States! I read someone who said, “All the people who weren’t bedridden, or had money, or had cars left. The people that are left had none of those things.”

There are people tonight who are going to sleep on overpasses for the fourth straight night. There are prisoners who will do the same. There are people dying at a convention center because no one will tell them that no one is coming for them, and the National Guard is protecting the kitchens. There are police officers who are turning in their badges because they’ve lost everything, have no guidance, and don’t want to be shot by a looter.

There are people tonight inside a concrete domed stadium with holes in the roof and no air conditioning who were told the buses are coming today, and they might, or they might not. There is no food. There is no water. There are bodies floating through the neighborhoods.

In the UNITED STATES.

Some people say that you can’t hold the President responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, “I want you to make sure this never happens again,” it was not meant to be specific to “no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss.” It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we’d save the ones we could.

And the Cabinet appointees were mushwits and he could barely speak a complete sentence and we’re sending people overseas for God knows how long to help people who are indifferent at worst and hostile at best, but they were going to protect us. In 2004, that’s all a lot of us needed. Well right now, it’s obvious that they can’t.

Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?

No. It wouldn’t. That city flooded in a day. And if it were Las Vegas, I would have been in some operations center watching people try to decide who gets to starve to death and who gets to get on a bus to Los Angeles or Phoenix. And there would be no certainty that I’d be on that bus in time to protect my wife and kids.

But one thing sure would have been different.

They wouldn’t have had a whole week to sort it out and know what’s coming. They were supposed to KNOW this already. It will have been FOUR YEARS next weekend since someone probably said, “Hey, what if…”

And for that, the whole stack of them should be fired…

…Today, I saw my country favorably compared to Indonesia and Thailand, (always our traditional benchmarks of infrastructural success) while the elderly die of thirst in the street. We sneered at France when this happened during a heat wave.

No more."

[Der_Trihs]

@Apos

Three years after 9/11, and there is pretty clearly no workable plan for how the nation is supposed to cope with a major disaster (of ANY sort): if there was it was tested and failed miserably. We have the heads of the relevant agencies spending more time on TV doing political spinning and praising each other than taking charge, working around the clock: exposing to the world that they don’t know facts (like what’s going on at the convention center, or that everyone feared that the levees would break) that the average CNN watchers have known for days.

According to CNN they had a plan. What happened to it, I don’t know.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – In a five-day, tabletop exercise last summer, emergency preparedness officials faced an imaginary “worst-case scenario” in which a hurricane hit the New Orleans, Louisiana, area.

A fictional Category 3 Hurricane Pam, with “winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain… and a storm surge that topped the levees,” was the picture presented to officials from 50 federal, local and volunteer organizations, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency dispatch from July 23, 2004.

Participants drew up action plans for dealing with the storm’s aftermath in which calls for evacuation were partially heeded, water pumps were overwhelmed, corpses floated in the streets and as many as 60,000 people died – mostly by drowning.

FEMA Director Michael Brown told CNN’s Larry King on Wednesday, “When I became the director of FEMA a couple of years ago, I decided it was time we did some really serious catastrophic disaster planning. So the president gave me money through our budget to do that. And we went around the country to figure out what’s the best model we can do for a catastrophic disaster in this country? And we picked New Orleans, Louisiana.”

Organizers said “Hurricane Pam” was based on weather and damage information developed by the National Weather Service and other agencies.

“Hurricane Katrina caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated,” Brown said Wednesday. “So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we’re implementing it.”

A Department of Homeland Security document described the resulting action plans from last year’s exercise: Participants determined a need for 1,000 shelters for 100 days. They decided they already had 784 and would need to find the remainder.

The state of Louisiana had resources to operate shelters for three to five days, and plans were made for how federal and other sources could replenish those.

The document also lists the allocation of up to 800 searchers for search-and-rescue operations and plans for disposing of more than 30 million cubic yards of debris and hazardous waste. The group of participants also devised plans for immunization against diseases, the re-supplying of hospitals and establishment of triages at university campuses.

After the drill, FEMA concluded that progress had been made, and that hurricane planning would continue.

But one of the drill participants, Col. Michael L. Brown, then-deputy director of the Louisiana emergency preparedness department, told the Baton Rouge Advocate newspaper that, in a worst-case scenario, there would be only so much government agencies could do.

“Residents need to know they’ll be on their own for several days in a situation like this,” Brown, who is not related to the FEMA director, told the paper.

Some plan. “Try to survive a few days in a disaster area with no food or water, maybe we’ll get there by then”.

[RyJae]

@Squink

Sort of a reprise of the 9/11 commission? :dubious:

No that was a finger pointing commission, some of the “problems” they found where fixed but the primary goal of both parties was trying to smear either Bush or Clinton.

@Pochacco

There’s bipartisan support for impeachment then?

Bipartisan? I have voted for Democrats more then Republicans in my life, would prefer to vote for neither because they both suck, but I digress.
Impeach?

“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”

Bush’s cutting the budget of an agency approaches an impeachable offense about as much as Clinton getting some lovin’ was.

It makes the left look about as horribly bad as the right did back then. But I guess thats politics now, that just ensures we fight amongst one another rather then find a true leader, one that doesn’t need to toe a “party” line.
As long as we stay being sheeple to the “party” system, thats kosher with those that are screwing us, both parties.

[The_Hamster_King]

@Abbie Normal

Bush’s cutting the budget of an agency approaches an impeachable offense about as much as Clinton getting some lovin’ was.

Sadly, yes. But nothing is going to change as long as Bush is in charge. The incompetence trickles down from the top. So it’s meaningless to talk about “working together to fix the problem”. The PROBLEM is a White House that doesn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground.

[furt]

@tomndebb

The Bush administration also merged FEMA into Homeland Security, then canceled several projects including the rebuilding of the NO levees in order to keep the HS budget from looking too large.

Would the hurricane have been as bad under Kerry? Certainly.
Would the disaster have been as bad? Not likely.

Tom, I’m disappointed to see you joining in the partisan polticking of this.

There is plenty of blame to go around; I’m pretty sure a right-wing blog would be entirely capable of searching old news articles and finding that the last administration didn’t do enough to prevent this either.

A lot of people screwed up. Playing politics while they’re still digging out the bodies is pathetic.

[yo_no_se]

Couldn’t agree more… playing the blame game while the crisis is still developing is bad form.

I wonder if any of those so quick to blame, understand the interworkings of the federal government with the local governments, the roles of the reserves, etc. Troops simply can’t waltz into a city and lay down the law without the local governmnet’s invitation, so on and so forth. Now I’m not suggesting that I know “the process” — I don’t. Would anyone like to enlighten me and probably many others?

For instance, O’Reilly just had a retired colonel on. Between the both of them it was more or less decided that the Gov of LA did not do what was needed in preparation before the storm hit. In addition, the retired colonel kept mentioning that the reserves should’be been ‘federalized’.

Anyone want to take a shot at this?

[MovieMogul]

@furt

There is plenty of blame to go around; I’m pretty sure a right-wing blog would be entirely capable of searching old news articles and finding that the last administration didn’t do enough to prevent this either.

Would those be the same right-wing blogs that were constantly reminding us that 9/11 changed everything? That the WTC tragedy should give the President more freedom to make deep-rooted systemic changes (creating the DHS, rerouting tax dollars) free of tedious congressional nosiness? That used Bush’s experience and commitment to keeping Americans safe as a reason to re-elect him? And they’re dredging up 10-year old cites as rebuttals? :rolleyes:

There’s certainly plenty of blame to go around, but Harry Truman had a sign on his desk–a quote with which W still seems completely unfamiliar.

[The_Hamster_King]

@yo no se

Couldn’t agree more… playing the blame game while the crisis is still developing is bad form.

Gotta move quick around the Republicans before things vanish down the memory hole. Criticize too soon and it’s “bad form”. Wait too long and you’ve missed the “accountability moment” and you’ll be told it’s time to “move on”.

I wonder if any of those so quick to blame, understand the interworkings of the federal government with the local governments, the roles of the reserves, etc. Troops simply can’t waltz into a city and lay down the law without the local governmnet’s invitation, so on and so forth. Now I’m not suggesting that I know “the process” — I don’t. Would anyone like to enlighten me and probably many others?

Bush is already admitting that he dropped the ball.

For instance, O’Reilly just had a retired colonel on. Between the both of them it was more or less decided that the Gov of LA did not do what was needed in preparation before the storm hit. In addition, the retired colonel kept mentioning that the reserves should’be been ‘federalized’.

I’m sure once this is sorted out that there will be plenty of blame for public officials in Louisiana. However, it’s obvious that right now they’re totally overwhelmed by the situation and are struggling (figuratively) to keep their heads above water.

The federal government is not similarly overloaded. Condoleeza Rice is shopping for shoes instead of responding to offers of aid from foreign governments. Dick Cheney is still on vacation. A tanned and rested George W. Bush has time to play the guitar and eat birthday cake.

A lot of the criticism of the Bush Administration would be deferred if it appeared that they were actually doing their jobs instead of slacking off. This is a far bigger blow to the country than 9/11. I want the White House working around the clock until this situation stabilizes.

[tomndebb]

@furt

Tom, I’m disappointed to see you joining in the partisan polticking of this.

There is plenty of blame to go around; I’m pretty sure a right-wing blog would be entirely capable of searching old news articles and finding that the last administration didn’t do enough to prevent this either.

A lot of people screwed up. Playing politics while they’re still digging out the bodies is pathetic.

On the other hand, I’m unimpressed with the bait-and-switch tactics used in your blog. The constant references to (10 year old) “flood control projects” that were reduced are belied by the same article’s later claim that a half billion dollars were spent in the years following that dispute. Then there is the disingenuous report that Clinton was “promising to veto” a bill (based on a separate issue). I’m sure that if Clinton had vetoed the appropriation, it could have been reported as such, which leads me to believe that some compromise was worked out to permit passage (otherwise the blog would not have resorted to their dishonest tactics). In the case of the New Orleans situation, there was a particular project to shore up the New Orleans levees that was gutted after it had begun.
From Kevin Drum in Washiungton Monthly

[quote]
[ul][li]Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana’s pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: “You would think we would get maximum consideration…This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.”[/li][li]June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay.”[/li][li]June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.[/ul][/li][/quote]

I’m sure that there is enough blame to go around, including among previous adminstrations. None of those situations apply to the promises made following the WTC/Pentagon attacks and the actual actions of this adminsitration that effectively have hamstrung FEMA:
A report from 11 1/2 months ago.

“Playing politics while they’re still digging out the bodies is pathetic”? So maybe the adminstration should not have been playing politics to create the situation where so many people became “bodies.” I have not actually posted any solemn condemnation of Bush or his people; I have simply responded to those who want to whitewash the whole issue and pretend that this was unavoidable.

[furt]

@tomndebb

Kevin Drum in Washiungton Monthly

A list that starts in 2001. Yes, all the problems started then. Everything was fine before that. Levees were twenty feet tall when Democrats were in office. :rolleyes:

I have not actually posted any solemn condemnation of Bush or his people; I have simply responded to those who want to whitewash the whole issue and pretend that this was unavoidable.

Right. You’ve issued no condemnation; just asserted that things would have been so much better were Kerry was in office.

Yes, there are knuckleheads on the order of stephe96 playing politics on the other side. Why descend to their level when the facts are not even in yet?

[tomndebb]

A list that starts in 2001. Yes, all the problems started then. Everything was fine before that. Levees were twenty feet tall when Democrats were in office.

Your irony does not work that well, either.
The half billion dollar project that your blog quoted occurred between 1996 and 2001. The specific cuts to that specific project occurred since then.
The Project Impact mitigation effort that had proved itself in the late 1990s was dismantled under Bush.
The local mitigation efforts that Bush left to replace Project Impact were denied funding by Bush appointees.
I have no doubt that things would have been bad under Kerry.
I see no reason to believe that stronger leveees and a functioning mitigation plan would not have created a better situation than we have now.

Of course, I was willing to listen to the UNMOVIC and the IAEA and other groups that Hussein had no WMD and I was willing to look at U.S. intelligence sources that showed no connection betwen Hussein and al Qaida when I was being told by apologists for Bush before our illegal invasion of Iraq that I needed to wait until the “truth” came out.
The truth is out there and we don’t need to wait until a new crisis distracts us from these issues to see where a lot of the serious problems originated.

I have not blamed this administration for the specifically slow response since the surprise of the failed levees on Tuesday. I have not claimed that the adminstration deliberately left New Orleans to suffer. However, we have the evidence of actions that could have mitigated this disaster and we know why they were shut down.

[Sam_Stone]

This is interesting (linked from NRO’s “The Corner”):

Mandatory Evacuation Ordered for New Orleans

This article was posted last Sunday.

In the face of a catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, a mandatory evacuation was ordered Sunday for New Orleans by Mayor Ray Nagin.

Acknowledging that large numbers of people, many of them stranded tourists, would be unable to leave, the city set up 10 places of last resort for people to go, including the Superdome.

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

Does Bush get credit for personally stepping in and appealing to the mayor and governor to call for an evacuation? What if he hadn’t?

I did a whole bunch of criticizing of Bush earlier, so I think it’s only fair that we look at the whole picture here. By most accounts I’ve read, the Governor and Mayor were really dragging their feet in calling for an evacuation. If it finally happened because the President personally intervened, then he may have helped to save thousands of people.

Also, what the hell was the mayor thinking in exempting all the hotels from evacuation? So what if there were no flights out of town? If the city is going to flood and die, being in a hotel isn’t going to help.

I think it’s time to calm down now with the blame game stuff. Now that the Mayor and the Governor are screaming at the feds, and the feds are screaming at other feds, it seems to me that we’re seeing a lot of ass-covering behaviour and blame passing. So it’s going to get really confusing for a while.

After this has settled down, the facts emerge, and inquiries are held, we may have a better understanding of what happened. And then heads should roll, whether they are Democrats or Republicans.

[tomndebb]

Does Bush get credit for personally stepping in and appealing to the mayor and governor to call for an evacuation?

Yep. He should get credit for that, particularly if it was his arm-twisting/appeal that got the mayor and governor to reverse their positions.

It should also bring a halt to the fairly silly complaints that he was engaging in photo ops after the storm broke.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@tomndebb

Yep. He should get credit for that, particularly if it was his arm-twisting/appeal that got the mayor and governor to reverse their positions.

Agreed.

It should also bring a halt to the fairly silly complaints that he was engaging in photo ops after the storm broke.

Why? If he encouraged the evacuation because he feared how bad it would be, why is it then okay for him to be mugging it up with an acoustic guitar later?

[squeegee]

@Sam Stone

I did a whole bunch of criticizing of Bush earlier

To my reading of your post… no, you didn’t. You lead with saying it may be fair to criticize the administration. Then “the blame goes further”, and quite a few parties were put on display who aren’t Bush and may be to blame. That may be fair but it doesn’t, at least to me, amount to “a whole bunch of criticizing of Bush” for you to say other criticisms are warranted.

[squeegee]

Just in. It’s from a hostile source, but it seems credible. According to Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La), during Bush’s visit to NO today, all helicopter flights were restricted:

for the entire time Bush was in the state, the congressman said, a ban on helicopter flights further stalled the delivery of food and supplies.

[squeegee]

I hit submit early, apologies.

So: while GWB was in NO today, no helicopter relief was performed. People on rooftops were not rescued (by helicopter), supplies were not dropped (from helicopters). I knew GWB carried around a personal “no fly zone” since 9/11, but this seems excessive and irresponsible.

[squeegee]

Gah, oops again: linky