Uncommon Sense, we don’t allow reposting of copyrighted articles, not even when another poster does not follow a link you provide. Don’t do it again.
Except that as soon as the wind died down, there was little major flooding. It wasn’t until the some crucial hours later that the levees gave way and the flooding became much worse.
Sweet merciful crap. Give it up man. So the New York Times agrees with you. That only proves that they have an idiot or two there to match the one we’ve got in this thread.
What the fuck do you want him to do? Run down there with a bucket and bail out New Orleans. He’d better bring Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, etc. or you’d really pitch a bitch wouldn’t you? Maybe he should recall all the troops in Iraq and deploy them to Mississippi. Would that make it all better? If he was any kind of real president, I suppose he would’ve built a really big umbrella over the entirety of the southern United States.
I’m no fan of the shrub either, but getting pissed at him over a friggin natural disaster is way past nutty.
No shit, sherlock. Sometimes all you can do still isn’t enough. A basic part of adulthood is finding out that life isn’t fair and sometimes nobody – not mommy, not the president – can magically make it all go away.
Gad! What an insight! I’m sure there are thousands of unused boats lying around New Orleans right now.
OTOH, at least our worst and dimmest aren’t, as you’re obviously doing fuck all about it.
Seizing on this sort of human catastrophe to try to score polical points is pretty fucking vile. Dead bodies floating in the water and all your petty little imaginations can come up with are snarky political attacks. Shit, I’m surprised you aren’t just downright giddy that it hit a “red state.”
Go fuck yourselves with razor blades, you despicable vermin.
Because as we all know, flooded streets = navigable water. Especially for large craft carrying more than, say, three people. Brilliant!
DMark: Are you aware–or do you just not give a hoot about nifty little things call facts–that the toilets weren’t all stopped up when the evacuees arrived at the stadium?
Just curious if anybody in this thread has changed their minds and now think that the government hasn’t been doing such a swell job.
At this point Bob I’m willing to say that I’m having second thoughts on my earlier stance…and I’m further willing to retract what I said to DMark about public opinion on this whole fucked up mess. I still haven’t been able to nail down all the facts as far as the blame tree goes on this one…it seems to be pretty wide. While I now think Bush is a bit higher up on that tree I’m still unsure exactly what his level of blame is…and who else is involved. I haven’t really gotten the specific answers to the questions I have yet in my GQ thread on this…at least not to the point to satisfy me and make me sure where to point my own finger.
-XT
I think the federal government has done what it could, for the most part. I think there were massive failures at the local and state level, and those failures have impacted what the federal government could be doing.
Having said that … nobody is without blame.
You’re a fair man XT. I can understand not flying supplies within range on Saturday or Sunday. I can even understand that nobody was prepared for the scope of the disaster and that Tuesday was optimistic for getting people help. In retrospect, putting thousands of people in one spot where you know the power will go out and the sewers and water as well doesn’t seem too bright. But Tuesday turned into Wednesday and we watch the news every night and see the situation get worse and worse. Thursday comes on and the head of FEMA admits that he just found out that people were trapped without supplies at the Superdome. There is a line somewhere between being honestly unprepared for a disaster of this magnitude and dealing with it with utter incompetence. In my book, this was over the line.
Whoops- I meant the FEMA guy was unaware of the situation at the convention center.
I disagree 1000%. Have you ever heard about the Department of Homeland Security? This type of disaster as listed a Mission #1 on their mission statement. Their job is to coordinate relief at all levels and they have failed their first test miserably. In addition, FEMA has written articles about this scenario for years and the National Weather Service put out a bulletin that this was about to happen before Katrina even hit. We discussed it in detail in other threads.
Exactly, and Bush declared large sections of the coast a disaster area before the hurricane even hit, to help speed up the process of getting federal aid. So why were mandatory evacuations not carried out? Why did the city and state not have their own plans in place?
FEMA steps in when a city and/or state can’t handle their own stuff. But everyone has known New Orleans faced this problem for decades. How is it the local and state government apparently had no plan whatsoever for this?
Once Katrina passed over southern Florida and entered the Gulf, everybody who knows anything about hurricanes knew this thing was gonna get big. Water temperatures in the Gulf were in the low 90s – perfect fuel for the storm. The only thing folks could hope was that it wouldn’t hit their area. Because of that, I think the federal government could have been more prepared with their response teams. When Katrina kept on churning westward, and it became more and more obvious that it was heading toward the Texas/Louisiana/Mississippi coastline, New Orleans should have been evacuated. It wouldn’t have helped the property damage, but it would have saved thousands of lives and alleviated the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.
That call was not made. And that responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana.
Let’s see - just a few days ago you said:
“DMark, there’s a time for partisan bickering, and there’s a time when partisan bickering makes you look like a festering pus-hole. Guess which time this is?”
So I guess you have determined the times they are a changin’.
I think more and more people are beginning to see some serious mis-management by George W. Bush and his cronies, and you can make excuses and nitpick all you want. As the days and weeks pass, we’ll see how blameless the White House and Homeland Security and FEEMA have been.
I stand by my OP that the widespread inactivity and lack of leadership by George W. Bush in this crisis was and is inexcusable. The only difference is that back on 9/11 he at least stood up after seven minutes. This time he sat on his ass in Crawford until things were totally out of control.
I disagree with this completely. What I’m coming to realize is that the problem here was one of preparation and forsight…not leadership after the fact. In fact, Bush attempted to get the ball rolling on this thing days before the hurricane struck…only to find out the ball was square and wouldn’t roll very well. Exactly who is the root cause of this problem though is still unclear to me. Was it Bush and the administration, cutting the budget to FEMA and and the Army Engineers? Was it the Senate and Congress who, while marginally upping the proposed presidential budget didn’t really make any kind of fuss over this…prior to the problem? Was it the local state governments, including the mayor of N.O., who should have known exactly what the problems were and also realized that with the current budget the Federal Government wasn’t taking care of things…and made some provision to take charge, or at least raised a serious stink before all this happened (and I’m talking here about the state of the dikes AND the seeming lack of a disaster/evacuation plan)?
Obviously to me there are quite a few levels of fuckup-ery here. If, for political reasons, Bush and the Administration no longer wanted to support FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers to do maintenance and disaster/evacation/rescue type services as the primary, why was nothing put in place to take its place? If this was known, where was the opposition hue and cry…why wasn’t there a huge fight in Congress over the budget, serious attempts made by Democrats to radically increase the budgets of both organizations both for the maintenance and for preparations for disaster? Why was there no huge effort on the local levels to make sure that gaps were filled in what the Fed was doing…and what needed to be done? Why the lack of planning at the local level if they KNEW the problems and they KNEW the shortfalls at the Federal level?
This seems a systemic failure at all levels, from Bush, through Congress and the Senate, to the local states…all the way down to the mayor of N.O. There is so much blame here that I don’t see how anyone with a straight face and a clear consious can point at any one person, or even any one party…hell, I’m not even sure I can point at simply the government on this one. I, as a citizen, may actually have to step up and say that I was a fucking ignorant moron too, as I didn’t realize it was this bad either. If asked before this disaster if cutting the budget to the ACoE and FEMA I probably would have honestly said it WAS a good idea, that the local states or preferably private industry could (and SHOULD) do it, and would do a better job than the Fed. Certainly I think the citizens IN N.O. and LA (and in the region) also need to take on their share of the blame for this.
Hell, I’m even going to blame the French for this! 
-XT
And if Bush had stormed in and started doing stuff immediately that’s the responsibility of the state governemnt, you no doubt would have castigated him severely for that.j
Your comment about the seven minutes is purely asinine and proves that you’re not basing your appraisal of the man on actions but on your politics.
My posting above is directed to DMark.
Bullshit, you ignorant choad.
I am more than willing to point out problems that occurred with the process, regardless of which political party is in power. That’s not partisanship … that’s placing blame where it lies, so the process can be fixed if (God forbid) we ever go through this again. Partisanship would require me going into this with a pre-conceived notion that one side or the other was wrong, then twisting facts around to fit my hypothesis. The fact remains that people could have been saved, suffering could have been avoided, if New Orleans had been evacuated. The fact remains that George Bush (nor any aspect of the federal government) was not responsible for that call.
I will say this: You are exactly right on one count. It’s beyond comprehension that the director of the federal agency in charge of disaster preparedness and relief has zero experience with disaster aid.
I dunno if you’re being obtuse on purpose, or if you’re just throwing chum in the water, or if you’re actually this stupid. Bush did what he could do, once it was evident this hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. I have read reports that he called the governor of Louisiana on Saturday, and basically begged her to order evacuations. I dunno if these reports are true, or if they’re just wishful thinking by Bush apologists.
Shortly after Katrina hit, New Orleans was not flooded. It didn’t start flooding until Tuesday, when the levees began to fail. Federal assistance (in the form of manpower) was not requested until that time. For the mayor to whine in interviews about sending buses to help evacuate is all well and good. New Orleans has literally hundreds of school buses in its city limits. Know why they can’t be used to transport people? They’re flooded out, because local officials didn’t move them.
Now, we can have discussions about the lack of funding for the levee system in New Orleans (which is both a federal and a state/municipal issue, dating back decades), the inherent stupidity of putting a person in charge of an agency he is obviously not qualified to run, and the overall ignorance displayed in having a major city in a bowl near the largest river in North America and the Gulf of Mexico. But we can’t, in good conscience and with any degree of intellectual honesty, claim that George Bush is solely responsible for the situation as it exists right now in New Orleans. He, and FEMA and other agencies, are having to try to clean up a mess they tried to avoid in the first place.
With all due respect, that’s not exactly true, at least as relates to Katrina, and Scott McClellan’s comments were misleading.
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/01/mcclellan-misleads/
The link to the original Newsweek article: MSN | Outlook, Office, Skype, Bing, Breaking News, and Latest Videos
Jesus fucking Christ you are an imbecilic asshole. I realize in your little elitist know-everything world cities like Grand Forks don’t exist. But we do. In '97 the entire fucking city along with East Grand Forks were emptied thanks to the aftermath of Blizzard Hannah (the 8th of the season). The entire region was underwater. We were stuck in Minot for almost 3 weeks before we could get home. And the city’s geographical placement is more like a tabletop than a bowl. The water drained much faster, and it still took almost 3 weeks to be able to return. I hope DTC wanders in here to give you the “left” version of the flood.
Now then. Did you notice the date of that flood? 1997 shitheel. Nobody in the Red State blamed Clinton for it. For the majority of us, we don’t expect “government”, on any level, to save us. We just wanted some help in the recovery. And we got it, and Goddamnit we were grateful. You’re just a prick for making this political. Have you lived through a flood? Do you know what actually happens on the ground in the aftermath? Do you know anything about the logistical nightmare of a major natural disaster that while anticipated in theory, never actually happened before?
I didn’t think so. Shut the fuck up and do something about it. Sitting in your own little world dreaming up things to blame on Bush doesn’t match up to what FEMA, Congress and Bush are doing. They, unlike you, are doing everything they can. I’ve seen what happens after a major disaster. I know what the limitations are to the hundreds of thousands that want to help out. They can’t for awhile. They just simply can’t. You may as well ask Bush to paint the sky green.
The real world (the one with people that I hope you limit contact with) doesn’t work at the speed of a cable modem. A natural disaster response isn’t something you whip out in 20 minutes like a PowerPoint presentation. There are always going to be major disasters around the world. And there will always be death. I think there are far too many people that think we can somehow control nature. We can’t. Nature will do what she wants and fuck off to us. And for the global warming pricks, can you be honest just once? Even if it’s affecting the weather, you’re not into this for the sake of saving Mother Earth[sup]TM[/sup]. You’re into it to save your own little space. It’s as selfish as anything else. Give it a rest.
So in conclusion, fuck Clinton. I now blame him for the flood. :rolleyes: