I’ll just keep this up until I get an answer, since it is directly related to the actual OP: how long should it take to drop some Polish Spring on a target the size of the Superdome?
I’m willing to wait 'til Hell freezes over.
It’s that easy.
Hey, why didn’t YOU do it?
Oh, well, I mean it’s not THAT easy, and you know, it wasn’t really OBVIOUS until Wednesday that they needed it, and the Lousiana authorities never told me that they hadn’t loaded extra water in the Dome, and . . .
And what kind of “smokescreen” do you accuse me of planting by telling you (from personal experience) that no one (and that can include the experts) knows exactly how to triage things in the hours after a huge, unpredictable storm? Remember on Sunday it was a Category Five, headed dead for N.O. Then it was a Category Three, veered off to the East (the news coverage Monday all made it sound like N.O. got off unscathed and Miss. was going to be Ground Zero). Then . . . events continued to evolve.
I have no interest in providing a smokescreen to Bush or the GOP. I think he deseves to be kicked out of office for betraying his duties on issues that clearly ARE the responsibility of the President (not going to war when national security and sovereignty aren’t at stake, not tolerating politically-motivated outings of intelligence officers by his cronies). So the jackanapeses who want to spout Michael Moore stuff about Bush-lovers will have to find another target than me.
As noted, I’ve been there. To continue my homely analogies, we spent a day and a half pulling our carpets out and trying to dry them in the sun. Seemed pretty urgent at the time. Then, gradually, we realized that we could never use them again. The time would have been far better spent finding some Visqueen and putting it over the bigger holes in the roof. But we didn’t know what Visqueen was. Or where to find it. Not at first. Yes, we were not the “experts” in this. But no one (and this includes the federal govt) is or should claim to be an expert in immediate and infallible response to events that are never alike, never predictable. If GWB, or anyone, ever told you they would shelter you from all harm, including natural disaster (and I’d need a cite), and instantly and without delay or inefficiency, would solve all naturally-incurred harm, then they were wrong to tell you an egregious lie. And you were wrong to be fool enough to believe it.
You weren’t in the Superdome.
Look, they were told to go there. If a body is told to be someplace during a disaster by someone in authority, that means that body can expect that said authority will actually remember that and deliver some supplies to said place pronto.
Not exactly rocket science.
As for your breathtakingly stupid initial answer, I don’t own a helicopter, 'cause I can’t afford one.
I don’t know. When did they find out the water was out? Were the locals telling them they had stocked their shelter with water (and why didn’t they, BTW?)? Is there a clear space near the Superdome (surely you didn’t mean “on”) where a pallette of the stuff could accurately and safely be dropped without crushing civilians? You’d have to fly pretty low for a precision drop like that. Hey, what if some numbnuts started shooting at the plane? Nah, that’d never happen. Right? Do we keep pallettes of Poland Spring ready to go on a moment’s notice? Do we have Pampers? Why stop there? Some Nutella, stat? None of these are useless ideas – they are just ideas that are not necessarily immediately ready to be put into execution on a target that is unknown until the day the storm hits (imagine planning the invasion of Baghdad if Baghdad moved around Iraq on a daily basis), by a federal government whose daily function is not feeding or hydrating people in fast-developing emergency situations.
Who’s done better, in a directly comparable situation, than the U.S. is doing here? The answers are pretty telling, as they boil down to (a) nobody; or (b) that’s not fair – there is no directly comparable situation – New Orleans is uniquely vulnerable, it’s underwater, they need help, this is really different!
Exactly.
Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit.
The Superdome lost power along with everyplace else in NO, which means it would have no water, because the pumps would have stopped working. Someone in FEMA should certainly know something that basic, and not need to be told. If they do need to be told, they also need to be fired.
Precision drop? No. Don’t be obtuse.
As for the rest, handwaving not worthy of an answer.
You were in the Superdome?
I bet if all the genii here who KNOW that the fed response was PATENTLY STUPID AND INADEQUATE BY AN OBJECTIVE STANDARD pooled their milk money, they could afford a helicopter and some Poland Spring. But it’s not that easy, and the federal government, though a larger agglomeration by far, is still an agglomeration of disorganized people. Always has been. Our greatest federally-led triumphs that people look back on fondly (Battle of the Bulge, D-Day) included staggering amounts of horrific confusion, incompetence, needless death, and nearly-catastropic lack of coordination – when viewed at a micro-level, minute by minute background. History has decided that, on balance, they were well-executed, all things considered, in the light of the passage of time and the end result. THAT is the point of the OP. (BTW, some campaigns are deemed failures on sober reflection, and nothing in the OP suggests that this can’t, when the facts are weighed at the appropriate time, be so classified).
Finally, you may be confusing your “authorities.” Most people (you included) are blaming the feds for the situation today. The people were told to go to the Superdome, and the Dome was run, IIRC, by the locals. Who are you blaming? The real answer is that lack of coordination among multiple jurisdictions and agencies in a chaotic situation often leads to such stupid results. Again, history will tell where the bulk of the blame should go.
What’s obtuse? Pictures I saw showed three feet of water around the Dome. At least at one point. Where’s the drop zone, gunny? Who’s going to unload the pallettes? I mean, since you know all about this stuff and it’s painfully obvious.
“I don’t have an answer” isn’t same as “not worthy of an answer,” BTW.
Your OP didn’t ask for where the blame should be specifically put, and I’m not really interested at this stage in laying it at any specific authority. This is the first thread in which I’ve engaged this question at all, and I was provoked by what I still consider to be an immensely stupid title and thread OP.
So, one more time: if an authority tells you to go someplace in a disaster, you have a right to expect that that authority, or someone higher than that authority, or someone called in by that authority, regardless and whatever, will deliver essential supplies to said place.
As for myself, as a taxpayer I have every right to expect that the authority to which I pay taxes for interstate disasters, which would be the Feds, would respond forthwith to disasters like this one. The Coast Guard was out there rescuing folks from rooftops as soon as the need for that became apparent. It should have been simple common sense to deliver supplies to the Superdome if you knew that that was the place that people were told to gather. And regardless of their denials, they knew that, 'cause they were watching the same news shows I was.
Not rocket science. Not by a longshot.
Which is indicative of your sublime confidence in the unerring soundness of your own instantaneous judgment, leavened with perhaps some healthy portion of reflexive Bush hatred. But not of much else.
My examples stand: Grant’s strategies were held in low esteem for much of the initial part of the war. Then he won, and views changed. (Lee’s tactics were ridiculed too till he started winning). Every major Allied WWII victory had moments when it looked like it could swing the other way, and the leaders would have been damned as idiots. How many tens of thousands of friendly fire deaths took place in the War? Enough that any given battle could have been singled out as the height of incompetence, by those so inclined.
No one has, yet, provided me with the EXACT ANALOGUE to Katrina, so that we can evaluate whether the federal government has responded better or worse than some other actual or hypothetical government. In fact, there is no exact or even close analogue. Accurate criticism (which I applaud) will require time to draw indirect analogies (e.g., with the official response to the stronger but smaller and less-floody Andrew). Or do you have an insta-storm-comparator?
Without a baseline, judgments about how the government “should” respond to sui generis situations are little more than individual passion-fueled speculation.
I’ve given you the baseline: delivering water to an officially designated shelter before people start dying.
Simple. Attainable. Not exactly hard. If you’re not into egotistic speechifying, that is.
Wait, I know, it “should” be “forthwith.”
Well, that’s helpful.
Time will tell whether any government, anywhere, has had a “forthwither” approach to an analogous situation. No one’s provided an example. If there’s no precedent (maybe there is), or if such precedent has been the exception rather than the rule in the history of huge, unpredictable storms, the immediate outrage at the failure to do that which hasn’t been effectively done before seems odd.
Delivering water to a shelter’s never been done before? That’s news.
Now I see the problem: you just don’t understand how governments work or ever have worked.
The local “officials” designated the Dome. You blame the federal “officials” (who are by no means in a chain of command with the locals) for not supplying it immediately. That isn’t how it works.
Also, cite for how many people died of dehydration, literally died of lack of water at the Dome? I’m sure it happened if you say it did.
By the way: when the OP says: it is premature to judge the OVERALL effectiveness and propriety of the governmental response until time has allowed us to way all the components of it in aggregate –
which part of that makes you think I was suggesting that no individual aspect of the operation had been flubbed? I’ve said throughout that there are sublimely stupid actions and mistakes committed in every massive campaign, by “successful” campaigners and “unsuccessful” ones as well. It is the premise of my OP (eye on the ball, here) that a campaign is not declared an overall failure or success because one mistake or alleged mistake did or did not occur in real time.
Your obsession with Poland Spring and the commando operation that should have been launched to drop it on the Superdome would have been great, just stellar stuff, in a thread that started “I assert for a fact that the fed gov. has delivered all the water it could and should have, and has otherwise made no tactical errors or misjudgments.”
In the OP I actually* posted, which posits that many individual mistakes (or non-mistakes) will need to be weighed to arrive at an overall judgment of the government response, your argument’s a missing-the-boat non-sequiter.
No, it’s meant as an example of what went on. It’s not that they flubbed some specific thing someplace, they flubbed everything. The example shows that even when they did something to try to help, they didn’t follow through in even the most stupidly basic way.
That specifically answers your OP: it’s not too early. It’s not too early, because up until yesterday the authorities - the state of Louisiana, FEMA, and the DHS, primarily but not exclusively - weren’t even functioning at a basic motor skills level in their response to this.
People die without water; therefore you supply water first. You supply it to the designated gathering points first, because that does the most good for the most people.
Simple common sense. Not followed. Therefore, it ain’t too early.
You know the difference between weak management and strong management? A weak manager says “someone deliver some water to the Astrodome”. A stong manager says “You, Bill, call every price club/grocery store, shopping center and buy all the water they have (keep the receipts). Jim, call up the National Guard and have tem send over a big Chinock helicopter…”
I have what I would consider a better than average understanding about logistics. People generally have little to no understanding of the complexity involved in getting things from one place to another. Yeah, no individual step is that hard. Yeah the concept of driving a truck full of Poland Spring to someplace is relatively simple. It’s in all the details of locating and shipping 100,000 1/2 liter bottles that bog people down.
Add to that the fact that there’s a hell of a lot more that needs to be done than dropping a few pallets of bottled water.
I now understand your position better. I don’t agree that it isn’t too early to judge good or bad, but I understand that you are not making the water-at-the-Dome a literal sine-qua-non for success or failure. (Having landing craft that didn’t open their decks in the heavy surf and drown the heavily-laden troopers would have seemed to be a sine qua non for an invasion of France to be successful, especially as I think we managed to drown many soldiers doing just this while drilling in England, yet by all accounts this happened on D-Day and still we later deemed the operation overall effective). You in turn realize I think that I do not give a rat’s ass if people like Bush (other than as it makes them illogically blame the government for situations that I would submit no one can handle) – I don’t like him either.
Passions (those of the victims, and those of observers) also hamper the search for a fair evaluation in the heat of the moment. I remember after that Air France flight crash landed in Toronto a few weeks ago 85% of people (passengers, experts, airline officials) were praising the heroic quick-thinking of the crew in evacuating the plane. Two passengers, IIRC, slammed them, said there was no coordination, they thought they were going to die. It was a weird contrast.
There was probably some subjective “truth” to both diametrically-opposed perceptions of how effectively the evacuation was handled. Now, with some perspective, we can say with due respect to the unhappy passengers, we’ve come to a consensus that all was done that practically could be.
I also think you understand that I’m by no means suggesting that we reach such a conclusion here, now. Merely (IMHO) that the facts aren’t all in (whereas, you think enough are to declare the game over as to the baseline competence of the feds).
I’ve been trying to withhold judgement but this thread has triggered several alarms here.
First, anytime I hear a request to wait for a few days before judging this administration’s actions, I assume somebody in the White House needs more time to shred documents.
Second, anytime a conservative invokes Bill Clinton’s name, I assume George Bush did something wrong.
Third, when I hear that any delay in relief is the victims fault, I have to smell copious amounts of bull leavings in the air.
Fourth, maybe we should let the liberals run disaster relief in this country. They at least believe in the idea that the government can accomplish things. Conservatives sometimes seem so committed to the idea that the government can’t do anything right, they feel obligated to prove it when they’re put in charge. That’s tolerable when they’re just screwing up the mail or foreign policy, but when it comes to people’s lives we need people running things who believe they’re part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Great post, except for ignoring all the posted parts about how I strongly dislike the Bush Administation and have absolutely no incentive to give it political cover. But, you people apparently don’t like actually reading.
But hey, it leaves no doubt as to your moral superiority (you told us so!) and your objectively superior commitment to Helping Those Who Need It! God Bless You (though that may be redundant, given that you’ve already in essence blessed yourself).
Tell me (I’m still waiting!) the historical example of a federal government doing an objectively better job in demonstrably analogous disaster circumstances, and then I will agree with your central premise that my call for reserving judgment is actually just a cynical ploy for covering up the sins of GWB (whom, IRL, I dislike significantly).
Now, back to the OP?
You didn’t “hear” that here, so why are you responding to it? Again, reading the posts that actually exist in this thread would help. I said that Clinton’s WH didn’t, and was not at fault for failing to, help me, myself, during a Category Five hurricane. First, that’s not really the President’s job (of course the nanny staters disagree). Second, even under a nanny state, there is no perfect response to unpredictable, imperfect disasters. Clinton was not to blame for not perfectly responding to Andrew.
Nothing in the OP was specific to “this Administration” or “the White House” currently in power.
Oh my children. Actually reading the stuff to which you’re posting bullcrap responses will save you a world of wasted time and partisan idiocy.
Postpone judgment huh? Okay, how about this?
Now, I want to be clear. I put most of the blame of the cause of the failure of the LEVEE squarely on the corrupt Louisiana/New Orleans government, but Bush’s incompetence is largely the cause of the CONTINUING suffering. So…
I call for an immediate impeachment of “president” Bush and charge him with MURDER! Get him out of the office so someone competent can take over. I don’t need to assess any situation to see that he was too lethargic in his response. To think he couldn’t be bothered with the biggest natural disaster in US history enough to cut short his vacation… his actions of neglect were absolutely CRIMINAL! If a Father did to their children what Bush did to the people of his country, why that Father would go to jail for YEARS for neglect.
Bush murdered the people that died as a result of not getting to a hospital in time. Even if he did the BARE MINIMUM (which is all he did) he needed to do for a disaster, he acted carelessly after he found out the news. (His reaction was slow, which appeared to the cameras insensitive - even if he ALREADY declared a state of emergency.) Even if he declared emergencies BEFORE the hurricane hit, plainly we can see that the already mobilized units didn’t get there in time. It is the commander in chief’s job to kick the butts of the people under him to get the job done as soon as possible. Roosevelt would have kicked some SERIOUS butt! The President has the power to push past the red tape and get the troops where they need to be. Screw the National Guard. He can’t mobilize the Army or Marines? I’m sure they are ITCHING to be useful. Can you imagine being a solder and having to watch people suffer and not being able to help them because your superiors won’t let you? I don’t envy them. I’m so glad to be in Houston where I can do some good.