Reviewing previous responses by the feds to natural disasters, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Jack Kelly argues that FEMA’s response actually improved for Hurricane Katrina—which devastated an area larger than Kansas or Utah or Idaho or Minnesota (and as large as Great Britain):
It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.
“Mr. Bush’s performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency,” wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.
But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.
Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:
“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”
For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.
Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.
So they libel as a “national disgrace” the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.
[my emphasis]
Meanwhile, here’s Newsweek’s take, which is not quite so kind in its assessment—but is nevertheless typical of a liberal-leaning press that is straining to pin the disaster on the federal government. From the rather frankly titled (and lengthy) “How Bush Blew It”:
[…] President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn’t quite realize how bad.
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
How this could beâ€â€how the president of the United States could have even less “situational awareness,” as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a centuryâ€â€is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn’t read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn’t wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn’t act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.
The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government’s response to Katrinaâ€â€like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into buildings on 9/11â€â€was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours of the storm’s arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take chargeâ€â€and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours.
Page 2 into this five-page piece, here’s what we know: Bush wasn’t paying close enough attention, according to unnamed sources frightened of El Presidente, who, we’re told, doesn’t like bad news and has been known to…what? Routinely have messengers executed?
We know that Bush watches ESPN. We know that the Iraq War is a failure. We know that the President surrounds himself with yes men. And all these things—when coupled with his “failure of imagination” (a more “imaginative” President presumably would have shredded the Constitution and dropped active duty troops into New Orleans over the objections of a sitting governor, and would’ve done so on Tuesday as the levees were breaking—in effect, anticipating what the local government was unable both to anticipate and prepare for)—highlight Bush’s failure.
In short, the dumbest, Chimpiest, most fascist President ever failed to be the most prescient, creative, Constitutionally “proactive” President ever.
This, my friends, is “journalism.”
Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society’s massive neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play. It’s also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb.
The failure of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate and react in time.
Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government’s response to the storm shows how Bush’s leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.
Is it true that Bush and his Administration are racist, Newsweek asks? To which they answer, too soon to tell, really; and besides, reading Bush’s mind is at times difficult.
But Bush’s management style—which relies on others to do their jobs—is clearly inappropriate for government. The Federal government, after all, is the nation’s nanny, and for Bush not to have recognized that local governments are essentially figurehead regimes quite unable to handle local emergencies (nor should they be required to: we have the federal government for that, after all, and they have all the money and power) is a failing of imagination UNPRECEDENTED in the annals of EVER.
[…]
But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center. “Max Mayfield has scared me to death,” Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early Sunday morning. “If you’re scared, I’m scared,” responded Morrell, and the mandatory order went out to evacuate the cityâ€â€about a day later than for most other cities and counties along the Gulf Coast.
As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel, where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was dry. “Phew,” Morrell told her driver, “that was close.” But then, from the elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of water. “Holy God,” she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead body.
At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He seemed unfamiliar with the city’s geography, but he did have a sense of urgency. “Water as far as the eye can see,” he said. It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. “I need to call Washington,” he said. “Do you have a conference-call line?” According to an aide to the mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, “You don’t understand, you don’t understand.”
So. Newsweek has decided it prudent to skip over the part where Bush called Nagin and Blanco to urge them to call for a mandatory evacuation and go right to the nameless FEMA bureaucrat identifiable only by his windbreaker and bureaucratic confusion. Newsweek also finds it strange that this nameless bureaucrat—who didn’t have as fine a familiarity with the city of New Orlean’s now partially underwater geography as the city’s Mayor—was surprised to learn that those tasked with running and planning first response measures didn’t have workable communication.
Did he not realize New Orleans is a poor city?
The “journalism” continues:
Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge. In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense of what had happened. “Nobody was saying it wasn’t a catastrophe,” Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu told news-week. “We were saying, ‘Thank you, God,’ because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even worse.”
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn’t quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. “Mr. President,” she said, “we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.”
Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive intervention by the active-duty military. “She wouldn’t know the 82nd Airborne from the Harlem Boys’ Choir,” said an official in the governor’s office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss’s conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.
So, to compare: Blanco, motherly-but-steely, whose only offense was that she was a little vague about what she needed—understandable (after all, this was a major disaster, does she have to spell it out for Bush?) given how beleaguered she was after weathering a massive hurricane—was toughminded and committed. Whereas for his part, Bush was sleepy and barely aware a Hurricane had even happened.
Beyond calling for the mandatory evacuation that Nagin, Blanco—and now Newsweek—ignored, that is.
By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in “Risky Business.”
Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the fearful faces on some young police officersâ€â€the ones who actually showed up for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had begun. At 2 o’clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. “One of my lieutenants told me, ‘I was looking into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes of a baby’,” Hosli recalled. “It was just terrible.” (When the AWOL officers began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told them, “You’ve got your own demons to live with. I’m not going to judge you.”)
At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than 100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses; no, FEMA was; no, FEMA’s buses would take too long to get there … and so on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There didn’t seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.
Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president’s Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, “I just asked him for help, ‘whatever you have’.” She asked for 40,000 troops. “I just pulled a number out of the sky,” she later told NEWSWEEK.
WHY ISN’T THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HERE TO SAVE ME? WHY DID BUSH PUT ME ON HOLD? HARDENED WARRIORS ARE FRIGHTENED, LIKE BABIES—NEW ORLEANS NEEDS HELP!
Wednesday.
She asked for troops on Wednesday.
And still no mention of her refusal to give up control to the feds. In fact, that they ASKED her to surrender control hasn’t even been mentioned.
“Journalism.”
The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen. But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent in to make it ready. By the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and hundreds of helicoptersâ€â€but it took at least two days and usually four and five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like TV crews, moved faster.
In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed “first responders,” the state and local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an 1868 law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law enforcement. The president, it’s true, could have invoked the Insurrections Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld’s aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.
The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disastersâ€â€FEMAâ€â€was dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official’s phone to call her office in Washington. “It didn’t work,” she told news-week. “I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t going to be pretty’.” Once a kind of petty-cash drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened.
An inept military and a Secretary of Defense who feared the maturity and preparation of his own troops; a FEMA official whose phone didn’t work—which is inexcusable, except when it happens to the Mayor of a poor city (at which time it’s perfectly reasonable); and an agency that had become useless once it was rolled into Homeland Security—except for the four Hurricanes it handled without a hitch in the last few years.
Sadly, the shining jewel of the Clinton administration had been reduced to ineffectual rubble by the Bushies—evident on page 5 of this story by the failure of a satellite phone to pick up a signal.
Journalism. Journalism.
Clearly, Newsweek has no understanding of FEMAs role. They have no understanding—nor have the bothered to mention—the disaster plan. Instead, they have concentrated on Bush’s management style—and have used their perception of that style to assert, obliquely and without a shred of actual evidence, that Bush simply didn’t care too much about Hurricane Katrina, and consequently, he let the Mayor and the Governor sink into the toxic floodwaters while he was off playing guitar.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes “metrics,” numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.
The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on Friday. As the president’s plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as “as blunt as you can get without the Secret Service getting involved.” Governor Blanco was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, “and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity,” Jindal said, incredulously. “How does that make any sense?” Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that “almost everybody” around the conference table had a similar story about how the federal response “just wasn’t working.” With each tale, “the president just shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing,” says Jindal, a conservative Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly, the president turned to his aides and said, “Fix it.”
According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush’s, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of “who’s in charge?” Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, “We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let’s do it.”
A debate over “federalizing” the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the control of the state governor, but the Feds can take overâ€â€if the governor asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon’s on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush turned to Governor Blanco and said, “Well, what do you think of that, Governor?” Blanco told Bush, “I’d rather talk to you about that privately.” To which Nagin responded, “Well, why don’t you do that now?”
The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn’t want to give up her authority, and Bush didn’t press.
Ah, finally!
Well, there you have it. The feds are responsible for the failure. Bush failed to anticipate that the City of NO wouldn’t follow its plan (what there was of one), that the Governor didn’t understand her function in the chain of command, and then—once he did know—his management style prevented him from wresting control of the state from Blanco.
Instead, he ticked off platitudes and passed the buck off to his aides.
Had he just cared more, Newsweek wants us to believe—had he just anticipated the disaster of local leadership and removed it (instead of napping and playing guitar), those frightened soldiers would have had it better, and all those people who died would have survived.
Of course, to believe Newsweek’s narrative attempt to frame the disaster this way, one has to believe, as Newsweek apparently does, that the Federal government is the only real goverment, and that the President and federal agencies are—or need to be—in control of all local disasters.
One must also believe that a President who emotes more is able to overcome Constitutional obstacles, and that one with a less “business-like” management style would’ve been able to understand—in his gut—what Governor Blanco really meant when she asked for nothing specific, would have (dare I say it?) felt her pain…
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as “strangely surreal and almost detached.” At one meeting described by this insider, officials were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up. Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
Just like in Iraq, eh?
Journalism.
****
see also, Captain’s Quarters (h/t Craig C); h/t for the Newsweek piece, John Cole
See also, Kevin Drum, who writes:
In the same Instapundit post I linked to yesterday  which asked whether Mike Brown was really any worse than past FEMA directors  Jeff Goldstein [Kevin provides no link] is quoted as asking another question: “I just want SOMEBODY to point out FEMA’s actual failures instead of using disputed resume blemishes and a lot of showy handwringing to suggest Brown’s failures.”
Have FEMA’s failures really been forgotten so quickly? Tens of thousands people trapped at the Superdome and the Convention Center without food or water? No buses available for evacuation? Lack of coordination with the National Guard and Northcom? Helicopters, trucks, the Red Cross, and other aid either ignored or turned away? That hasn’t been forgotten in less than a week, has it?
Note that Kevin’s list of FEMA failures are not actually FEMA failures—unsurprising, in that Kevin has shown throughout this ordeal a reluctance to let facts get in the way of partisanship. And sadly, he seems not to care about what FEMA’s function is. For instance, FEMA is responsible for coordinating with the Red Cross, who themselves note that they were kept out by the local government; that FEMA isn’t in charge of the evacuation plans (and that the Convention Center wasn’t included in evacuation plans); that FEMA mobilized buses from outside the region even while those inside remained untouched; that Northcom was on the scene almost immediately via the USS Bataan (which he really should have known, as he posted testimony to that effect from a Northcom spokesman, and news reports confirm that rescue missions were being flown right after the hurricane moved inland).
Conclusion? Kevin must be positioning himself for a gig at Newsweek.
“impressive” does not do this post justice
An absolutely embarrassing pack of utter bullshit on the front page of the NYTimes today describing hesitant federal officials and beleagured local officials. All I see from the stuff here and on other blogs is hesitant local officials beleagured by their own incompetence and frustrated federal officials who actually met their expectations
Well put.
I’m feeling even more pleased to have subscribed to your RSS feed.
Well, that explains the circulation problem with newsweeklies.
Did they accidentally print the overseas version here in the US?
Great post.
Quick aside: The passage that begins “Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies” is incorrectly formatted—it’s not block-quoted as the other Newsweek excerpts are, and thus appears to be your own writing.
They’re not even hiding their biases anymore, are they? Al-Newsweek, you SUCK.
Total. Fucking. Hitpiece.
Well done, Jeff. Well done.
Facts, facts, facts…the chumps who buy our pap, don’t want facts!
I have offically become as fanatic as them in that I hate the MSM as much as they, the Mediacrats hate Bush.
If Newsweak isn’t the worst of the weekly rags, than I sure am glad I don’t ever glance at any of the others.
Those idiots at Newsweak used to send their bird cage liner to me without my having ever subscribed. No idea why. But, when it showed up each week, I would flip through it, vainly seeking out a well-written story or balanced presentation of the news.
It is far and away the most left leaning, democrat stroking piece of shit on offer in these United States.
Reading it is strictly for suckers or those doing opposition reasearch, because outside of the George Will columns and Fineman occassionaly deciding to put on a gloss of fairness, it is irredeemably leftist.
Jumpin’ Geehosefat! At the risk of link ho’ing here are a couple of perspectives from a normally hostile environment.
What did you put in the drinking water down there?
I was about twenty when I swore off the weekly newsmagazines. Even back then, it was obvious that they were not just giving the news, but also telling you how to interpret it. I see that as seminal, as it was my first baby step away from the left. The hard thing about readiong the left is to figure out who knows exactly what they are doing (such as Begala) and who is just plain stupid (such as Maureen Dowd).
Great post!
That couldn’t be a nice sideways bitch about “Iron Laws” imposed after 9/11… could it?
Brilliant work, Jeff. You’ve fisked Newsweek into the next millenium.
Further thoughts…
While I do understand it’s important to counter the barrage of BS that’s flowing from much of the media right now, I think conservatives and libertarians should also be careful how they approach all this.
By that I mean we should be careful not to get stuck arguing this stuff on the left’s playing field. Their arguments boil down to “X, Y and Z show that Bush really screwed up/doesn’t care/etc.” Many of us have been responding with “No, actually, A, B and C show that Bush did well/he does care/etc.” The whole thing is turning into this maze of minutiae.
Our core argument should be about the proper (i.e., limited) role of the executive branch of the federal government. When the left says, “he didn’t do X, Y, Z,” and we respond with, “you’re wrong, he did A, B, C,” we’re implicitly acknowledging the left’s premise—that this is the president’s job to begin with.
I know that many of us have been cognizant of this, and have tried to keep our eyes on the ball. Goldstein does it throughout the above post, for instance, noting Constitutional limitations and the like. But I’m afraid that we’re still largely fighting this battle on the left’s ideological turf.
That is, of course, partly a product of the fact the left started this fight. They’re the ones who launched the blame game at the outset. From the first wielding of the “guitar photo” and the “looting”/”finding” caption hoopla, it was clear where this thing was headed.
But that doesn’t mean our defense has to be mounted on the left’s terms. For every “Bush didn’t do this,” the appropriate response is “Yes, he didn’t do that, because that is not for him, or any U.S. president, to do.”
If we engage in a meticulous back-and-forth about who-did-what-when, we’re silently conceding that the left’s expectations of the federal government are justified, and now it’s merely an argument about whether those justified expectations were met.
Rick Moran’s much-touted “response timeline” is a good example of that. “See, the feds DID do such-and-such.”
The biggest longterm danger of Katrina is that it will allow the idea of big, centralized government to further penetrate the American mindset. That notion should be repulsive to anyone of a right-leaning mind.
Through all this, we need to hold tight to core principles. We need to stick to them—and them alone—in our rhetoric, by saying: Yes, the catastrophe in New Orleans was horrible, and yes, perhaps an additional price was paid because of the structure of government in the United States. But that structure is what preserves liberty, and there is sometimes a price to be paid for liberty. It is during times of desperation that we must be most mindful of liberty. Because those are the times—the Depression, a natural disaster—when we are most apt to rashly damage the very institutions that preserve it.
Chris, try this piece I wrote earlier.
Someone suggested it is a pity the Dems aren’t as good at busing people out of the city as they are to the polls. Maybe at the next threat they could have a refendum for a New Orleans pork give away, but have the election in Baton Rouge.
You have to give Mr. Drum extra time to catch up. He was one of the last five people to admit that the TANG memos were fake, which isn’t suprising since he was the pied piper of the “Bush was AWOL” brigade.
Grade on the curve if you must, but you have to in his case.
Great post, Jeff … one question though why ‘Great Britain’?
Who the hell knows how ‘big’ Great Britain is in meaningful way?
US States, Area
Minnesota 86,943 square miles
Utah 84,904 square miles
Idaho 83,574 square miles
Kansas 82,282 square miles
Anybody that’s driven across Kansas would *instantly* go ‘damn’ at the scale of the devestation.
BS —
Yeah, I only chose that because that’s what Kelly chose. But I’m going to change it. I think I might use Utah.
Mormons,you know.
I think Great Britain works because it is an entire country, and that’s what puts it in perspective.
Just call me Captain Obvious. That was my way of saying I think an entire country works better than Utah.
How about both, then? Words don’t cost nothing.
JEFF HAS NOW GONE WHOLE HOG!
Good work Jeff, and just for the record. US News and Wrold Report was no better. And not to pick on them, but go look over at the Corner this morning. They haven’t been much better either. I think what amazes me most about journalists, is how uninformed they all are (both left and right). When you add that to their natural tendency towards self importance, well it’s a pretty toxic mix. It is a profession that needs to be put out of our misery.
Where’s that paypal button?
Brilliant, Jeff. There may have been no Korans in the toilet, but that’s where you’ve put Newsweek’s credibility.
Governor Blanco “motherly but steely?” I’m speechless.
If you didn’t have time to catch Mary Landrieu on Fox news this morning, Jeff, you did not hear her response to Chris (she called him “Mike” at first) Wallace’s question regarding why they allowed the flooding of the school buses. She started into a rant about how the Bush adminstration had created the problem by failing to perform urban transportation planning. Wallace was clearly astonished at what she was trying to pull.
Just a reminder that Landrieu’s father, “Moon,” was mayor of New Orleans 1970-78, and her brother is the Lt. Governor, so the family may very well be complicit in the years of failed leadership—at both the local and state level—that made this disaster possible. She may have a personal investment in shifting blame that reaches far beyond her Senate seat.
Thanks, guys.
I hope this post gets spread around, but I’m not holding my breath. Evidently, settling on “there’s plenty of blame to go around,” is the most convenient stance to take; but that’s just not cutting it for me. It’s a platitude, and I want facts.
Jeff–
Great fisk. I have to say, though, that you excerpted far too much of that article. My eyes are still stinging. I think I’ll go put some Visine in now.
Here comes the 21st century race pimp, Barack Obama:
Let’s see, senator. “Whoever was in charge of planning” was… a black democrat mayor and a white democrat governor.
TW north – Jeff evidently has stolen some code from Google and has this thing mindreading.
The victims that the press forgot.
It’s amazing what you think about when you don’t let others think for you. For example, based on the national MSM where do you think hurricane Katrina hit? If you answered New Orleans you would be wrong. The hurricane actually missed New Orleans and hit the Gulf coast to the east of the city.
There are towns and cities in the direct path of Katrina. Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, Pascagoula. And here devastation is dramatic and, in some places, complete. But you have to go to local sources and local reporters to become aware of this. You also have to go to local sources to find out what is being done by the good people of this country to come to the aid of those who suffered the most.
Why this disregard for the rest of the Gulf that got the brunt of the storm?
Well, New Orleans was the largest city affected by Katrina.
Then too, the MSM reacted to the extravagant antics – and colorful language – of the major of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, and the weeping of Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco. And the anger … don’t forget the anger; it makes for good images, and draws an audience.
Familiarity may have had something to do with it: New Orleans is nationally known and famous – or infamous – for its customs. There probably isn’t a national reporter who has not been to the French Quarter in New Orleans, sampled its food, and its flesh. Most would have a hard time finding Pascagoula on the map.
Politics may have had something to do with it: Democrats have run Louisiana and New Orleans since Reconstruction. Mississippi has a Republican governor who was actually blamed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for causing hurricane Katrina.
And race may have had something to do with it: New Orleans is about 67% black, the communities on the Gulf coast are majority white. (If you want links to the demographics of the Gulf cities, click on my website).
Whatever the reason, those who were killed, injured or merely dispossessed on the Gulf coast will continue to be ignored while the story is the flooding of New Orleans. But that’s OK. At least the satellite trucks of the ghouls currently exploiting the dead in New Orleans will not be getting in the way of the rescue efforts of the good people of the Gulf coast.
Jeff,
A brilliant and devastating Fisking.
Unfortunately, the MSM and the left is into the ‘pound the lie until you drive it home’ mode. Whether we like it or not, the MSM is unfortunately still the big megaphone in our society and they have gone into a frenzy on this.
They (the MSM) do not care about the truth, they care about #1 sales and #2 getting Bush. They are going to hammer on this relentlessly until it becomes the dominant meme.
It can be downright depressing, that’s why your fine tireless work, as well as the great work of others, on getting the truth out has been so important.
I think that the truth will finally be told, but by then the MSM and thee left will be on to something else and when discussing this, they will use these lies as a buttress to their arguments by citing all of these stories that were in the press as if they were true.
Fortunately, I think that the democrats and others on the left underestimate the intelligence of the public.
Time will tell.
Keep up the great work.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but the argument in the opening is that FEMA has improved in its speed since other hurricanes. The sole example given is that National Guardsmen were in the area after Katrina faster than they were after Andrew.
FEMA has no authority over the National Guard, do they? For that matter, as I’ve heard several conservative people saying, the President and the Federal government have no authority over the National Guard except in cases of national emergencies (which I would argue Katrina ranked, but this authority wasn’t invoked).
So…how does this example in any way show FEMA or even the Federal government was faster than in other hurricanes? It seems to show that LOUISIANA was faster than Florida was in calling out the Nat’l Guard, which also doesn’t seem right…is it?
FEMA may coordinate the Guard from other states on loan to LA.
Jeff:
It is my inferrence that this issue must have come up at some point before 9/2, but haven’t seen it specified anywhere.
Is there a confirmed point when this exchange took place?
Well, that piece was written by Evan Thomas, who predicted that the mainstream media would provide 15 points for John Kerry. Guess he knew all too well what he was talking about.
Well done! I think the happy talk and the “we’re all to blame” is just another coverup for the obvious local Democratic fault. What’s next, Bush was too busy abusing Korans to call up Nagin’s buses?
Unfortunately, the Bushies are letting this narrative develop. I don’t know why he doesn’t say someting. The one time he shut the media up is when he was peppered with questions about how he could possibly think of attacking Afghanistan during “holy” Ramadan. He replied quickly that Mohammed did himself. End of questions.
Landrieu:
“…started into a rant about how the Bush adminstration had created the problem by failing to perform urban transportation planning…”
This is likely going to wind up biting her on the ass hard if she keeps it up. There are very few things a southerner would less like to here than “Washington knows better than you do”
Obama said:
“…There seemed to be a sense that this other America was somehow not on people’s radar screen…”
THERE ARE STILL POOR BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA?
WHY WASN’T I INFORMED OF THIS!
I’m liberal and even I want Bush to defend himself against this pap. New Orleanans are safe (for the most part). some even have a new lease on life. Come on George, show some you know what.
As a liberal, this attack on Junior’s authority doesn’t even make sense. First, you don’t get all sides then you demand that the so called “fascist” gets more power during a natural disaster??
IMO,
The big boys on the right side of the blogosphere took a dive on this. It has been the smaller blogs that have been the water carriers in trying to push back the Lefties and MSM. Perhaps it is a built in limitation due to the fact that they want to appear, or actually are, better folks than the KOSacks.
With Glen, Michelle, the Corner, Hugh, and the Captain not willing to push back (for the children, dammit!!) immediately, it was too late to stop the MSMeme.
Brown Lied, Poor Black Folk Died!!!
Fema Failed, FEDGOV Bailed!!!
For the CHILDREN, dammit!!!
I am actually pretty bitter about the response, and am left praying that the political fallout for the convervatives isn’t as bad as it may be.
Facts two weeks later will NOT change the publics perceptions of this disaster. We needed action at the beginning, before this foolishness got started.
TW: perhaps, perhaps someone needs to rethink the entire format of the Corner. The Instant Message style back and forth leads to too much emoting (sp?), and not enough critical thinking. They appeared as a bunch of whiners the last two weeks. Same for Michelle “Proof FEMA made mistakes? We dont need no fuckin PROOF” Malkin.
Enough
To Brian at 4:39 PM
More pre-positioned equipment. It is what that means. FEMA still can get stuff from all over the country but that stuff only arrives much later.
The State asks for stuff(and needs to know what it asks and where it goes not like the Governor rants) and FEMA manages to get that support in time.
Brian —
The piece notes “The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented.”
As FEMA is not a primary responder (their job is to coordinate follow-on relief, as well as pre-staging and coordinating for some immediate relief after an assessment period), it’s important to note here that they met their own mandate and had relief on the scene within the 72-96 hour time frame—and on the quick end (3 days); what’s impressive about this is that the size of the disaster—including a secondary disaster, the flooding after the levee breaches (coupled with the need to improvise after the first responders and local leaders dropped the ball)—is unprecedented, as was the volume of support delivered, as van Steenwyk notes.
Describing the death of those who, no matter the reasons, were unable to evacuate as “… a price to be paid for liberty” is exactly the sort of blatent callousness that is, unfortunately, what passes for conservative thinking these days. For shame.
Describing the death of those who, no matter the reasons, were unable to evacuate as “… a price to be paid for liberty
So what you’re saying is that if they were valuable slaves they’d still be alive ???
Wow,
What an amazing circle jerk you have going here Jeff! Reading tje amazing nonsense, that is being spouted in this article and in these comments really helps us understand how you guys in the ever collapsing 38% think.
For those with your heads in the sand.
1. State of Emergency was declared Friday before Hurricane.
2. Handoff do the Feds was established Saturday.
3. Fed Response wasn’t until the presidential Photo ops the following Wednesday.
Obviously you guys aren’t big readers so we’ll link you to the audio timeline as presented on NPR earlier this week.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4839666
This report give you the sense of the execution at the state and local level. What is obviously missing? Why it’s the response from the Fed’s via FEMA and other agencies that require presidential authority to move. Maybe if we could bottle the smell in New Orleans, and mail it to you it might wake you up to the scale of disaster that has occured here.
We know none of you right thinking people will even bother listening to the report, but we figured we’d try to inject a dose of reality here.
Actually, Jack, let’s not Dowdify the quote, the get our vitue glands in a bother and dismiss the argument with that smug sanctimony of someone who just cares too much.
Here’s the full quote, from Chris in the comments (above):
Chris’ argument is that, though people died, the improper reaction would be to dismantle the federalism that gives sovereign power to the states in order to federalize disaster relief, taking it out of the hands of the states and local municipalities who, under ordinary cirumstances and with competent leadership, are better equipped to handle first response and early-stage planning.
Your reaction, sadly, is typical: assume a moral high ground you haven’t earned by intimating facts you haven’t established.
“Patience” —
The astounding arrogance you show is part and parcel of why you can’t win a fucking election to save your smug souls.
Rather than assume we haven’t read anything and are engaged in a circle jerk, whynot read some of the other stuff I’ve written on the response to Katrina?
Oh, I know why. Because it’s easy just to call us all rightwingers, throw out silly non-sequiturs about the smell in New Orleans, assert your own self-righteousness, then disappear back into the fog and stink of your own ill-informed echochambers.
Trust me, pal. We’ve done more research on the applicable documents, statutes, and jurisdictional battles than you have. So comments like yours just solidify in our minds that people like you are so eager to score political points that you are totally incapable of anything approaching critical consideration.
Or, to put it another way, you’re just a stupid fuck.
Christ, Jeff. You’re stepping up as one of the sanest pundits in this country. I’m afraid it can’t be long before you’re bought out by womeone who can marginalize you.
Patience, amazing amount of dishonesty you packed into such a short post. Before the hurricane, all that Louisiana Governor requested was funding.
Did any checks bounce yet?
There was never a “handoff” to the Feds. Louisiana Governor alway retained control of the response and still does.
Wednesday was the day after the levees failed. Coast Guard and Navy aircraft were already responding.
The FEMA response to Katrina was an order of magnitude larger than for any previous hurricane and yet arrived in the same timeframes.
Just keep up the dishonesty, “Patience”, as people are starting to realize that that is the sole platform left to Democrats.
uh. “someone”
Patience:
“2. Handoff do the Feds was established Saturday.
3. Fed Response wasn’t until the presidential Photo ops the following Wednesday.”
Nope.
There was no “handoff’ to the Feds, as far as real control of the situation. There still hasn’t been. General Honore? Guess who he reports to, and if you guess higher than the Governor of Louisiana, go stand in the corner.
The Fed response started tooling up the Saturday before the storm hit. The first Federal support came in Tuesday, in the form of Coast Guard helicopters. Most of the rest of the support had to wait until early Wednesday, once the roads were clear and the bridges were inspected. The first major Federally-funded and coordinated effort that you noticed on TV was the buses that FEMA paid for and the Department of Transportation arranged.
There were other people trying to slam help into New Orleans (the Red Cross and Salvation Army), but they were kept out on specific orders from (once again) the Governor.
It just goes to show that the biggest critics of the Feds are the ones with the smallest amount of info on what actually happened and who’s supposed to do what job…
Jeff, I think you’re doing a disservice to stupid fucks everywhere by putting “Patience” into their category.
As one, stupid fucks around the world are rising up in protest, calling out “that jaggoff is way more stupid than we are, and a helluva lot more of a fuck.”
Anybody else notice “Patience“‘s use of plural when referring to itself? “us, we”..
What’s your other names? “Flower”? “Rainbow”?
“Stupid fuck”?
patience—aliens always remove their anal probes, so it’s your head that is the source of your discomfort.
Dammitall, Jeff, the worst part of this amazing piece of work you (mostly, but also some of your commenters) have put together is that you make it all look so easy.
So inspired I tried to clear up some complete misunderstandings and outright lies on a different website and all I could do is keep posting links back to here.
Thanks to all of you, but espcially you, Jeff. That you also provide GAY PORN is only that much more impressive.
Cirby correctly points out
Which, of course, had to be brought in because Nagin allowed his own supply of buses to be destroyed by the flood. I wonder, is it Bush’s fault that the bus’s drowned? IE, Bush should have specifically instructed Nagin to store vital emergency response equipment on high ground?
I’d settle for the Left’s fascists-in-search-of-a-leader brigades using the term ‘coordinate’ rather than ‘control’ when referring to FEMA.
But, that’s unlikely.
Taking into account patience’s post above, those among the reality-grounded can make the case better than the reality-based. You just need to tack on , they might have a point.
They Might Have a point
If Blanco had said on Friday, August 26th “Mr. President, my staff tells me I’m going to need 2 Army communications companies on stand-by in Baton Rouge and one in New Orleans by Sunday” and those companies were not ready in time, they might have a point.
If Mayor Nagin had brought the car adapter for his cell pohne and $45 Jump Start Battery with 12V adapter to THE COMMAND CENTER during an EMERGENCY so that his cell phone wouldn’t die out, they might have a point.
Had the Red Cross not been prevented from delivering prestaged supplies and food to those in dire need, they might have a point.
If the Left understood the distinction between a levee breach and an overtopping of a levee, they might have a point.
If the Left understood that 450 mile wide severe weather systems travelling at 12-15 miles per hour take 30-40 HOURS to clear out of an area, 12-15 hours after landfall, they might have a point.
If the strongest link in the levee system didn’t fail, they might have a point.
If the speed of response in a large scale logistical operation was directly related to Bush’s on-hands personal involvement, they might have a point.
If Mayor Nagin did not exert direct control over the New Orleans force and National Guard units on Wednesday, September 3rd, directing them away from Search and Rescue to prevention of looting, ths nullifying the contention that Mayor Nagin had handed control over, they might have a point.
Had Governor Blanco written Executive Orders during the week following the hurricane that detail the lawful basis for the Louisiana Governor to commandeer private resources in the state in times of crisis or disaster, they might have a point.
… and so forth.
Here are a couple facts:
http://www.nola.com/weblogs/print.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/print074994.html
Thus the local authorities were literally inundated.
Second, the last paragraph of the Hurricane Pam Exercise press release from FEMA states:
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=13051
Note the highlighted phrase. Katrina was clearly a national incident, given the impact on the highly strategic infrastructure of the Gulf Coast. Let’s at least agree that the scope here was larger than any one state’s sovereignty.
I suspect as time goes by the MSM’s coverage of this event will look worse and worse. They don’t know it yet, but it could end up costing them great number of readers and viewers. You know, Jeff, bumping this to the top over the next couple of days might be a good diea. More people need to see this stuff.
No, Jack, let’s not agree. Even a very large hurricane doesn’t trump our Constitutional form of government.
Jack –
If the local authorities were inundated and unable to control the situation it would have been wise of them to turn the power over to the feds.
FEMA is charged with “effectively manag[ing] federal response and recovery efforts following any national incident.” Which is what they are doing and did do.
But there is nothing in that document that claims the response can be instantaneous, because an instantaneous federal response is impossible logistically (other than bringing in certain pre-staged resources)—which is why they draw up plans in conjunction with the state, a plan in which authority and responsibility are established and delegated, and timelines drawn up.
For the 1000th time, FEMA clearly notes that relief, following assessment and coordination, takes 3-5 days. For the 1000the time, the state and local govt. was tasked with evacuating people.
Somebody mentioned The Corner and so I surfed over for a peek.
What a spectacle. Rod Dreher reposts his hissy fit that I first read on another site. No specifics about FEMA failures, natch.
But Rich Lowry and John Podhoretz disappointment that Bush didn’t ritually disembowel Brown on national TV was a fresh low.
Coupled with JPods near glee at the prospect that Bush Admin insiders might finally start playing the traditional Washington game of “Shit on the President of the United States, of the record, of course!”; and its a dog’s breakfast of establishment “conservative” thought.
Jack:
Yes, it was, and since we have the type of government we have, the solution was for the Governor of Louisiana to say, specifically, that she needed a lot more help than a few million bucks and some assistance clearing out debris.
The things that needed to be done, and that the Governor knew needed to be done could have been fixed with a couple of signed pieces of paper and a phone call or two. This was all arranged ahead of time. Due to the fact that the idiot Governor refused to do these things, and due to the other fact that overriding her in the fashion many are assuming would be against Federal law (and the Constitution), you must therefore agree that the blame for the whole matter is in the lap of that same really, really stupid Governor.
Of course, the post-hurricane relief efforts that were directly prevented by the Governor’s commands in order to starve people out of New Orleans (after the locals didn’t manage to evacuate them with the readily available resources) should lead to some sort of felony charges in the fullness of time.
(At which point the same people who are screaming that the Feds should override the powers of the states will shift into reverse and claim that there’s no need for the Feds to interfere…)
Oh, I almost forgot, Ramesh Ponnuru even joins the pig pile with a smart ass remark about Brown. Or at least it appears to be a crack at Brown but I find it hard to say for sure since he might be going after Michael Barone for not being sufficiently hard on Bush for hiring Brown or something…
And yes, I’m venting about The Corner here because those bastards don’t offer a convenient way to address their occassional idiocy. Which is one reason why I’ve not been clicking over as much lately.
One correction to an earlier post made above. Honore is in charge of the US active duty personnel engaged in the Katrina relief effort. His troops do not perform law enforcement tasks and thus he doesn’t report to Blanco. The La NG and the guard components from other states in the multi-state “mutual assistance” pact report to Blanco and are carrying out law enforcement and relief tasks.
Great comment here from jarhead dad, who drove relief materials into the disaster zone. This deserves to be tattoored on Rod Dreher’s forehead.
<a href=”http://iraqnow.blogspot.com/2005/09/air-force-loggie-weighs-in.html#112647517231161923″ target=”_blank”>
You pajama clad rubes fail to understand that we leftist journalists define reality. We gave 15 points to Kerry, and we’re taking away 20 points from Bushchimpy right now. Get over it. You have no control. We have it all. We’re going to grab power in this country, grab it totally. Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe provide the models for how we can circumvent the awkward obstacles of the constitution and checks and balances. We are all playing from the same playbook now. We are ready to take over.
Thank you for a really GREAT post, for putting into words the frustrations that so many of us are feeling.
And a NECESSARY post. Ditto everything “smacko” said. I’m very disappointed with many blogs I used to respect.
She started into a rant about how the Bush adminstration had created the problem by failing to perform urban transportation planning.
Gee, if that is the feds problem, maybe they could come down here and slap around Lois Frankel who’s been slowly ruining downtown Palm Beach FL for several years now.
CNN braodcast a bizarre “Katrina Timeline” piece the other night (I think it was Friday).
In one segment, Kathleen Blanco was on camera saying, “If only we could have gotten buses in here, we could have evacuated a lot more people.”
Her image was on a split screen – she was on the left, and on the other half was a shot of the infamous water-logged NO school buses. Of course, CNN didn’t bother to mention to whom the buses belonged, or why they were never deployed.
OT(?): Mary Landrieu’s head just exploded on Fox News Sunday.
Suppose I were to suggest that your account of “what actually happened” is at least as credible as Kevin Drum’s or, for that matter, Newsweek’s or Scott McClellan’s or my own? Now, what if I were to also suggest that your account is at least as selective, as one-sided and as self-serving as those other accounts?
Would you be more inclined to accept my first judgement and to reject my second? Be honest.
What’s happening here is that you are selecting your arguments, your facts and ultimately your ‘truth’ on the basis of whether they match the color of your pre-existing ideas. There’s nothing remarkable about that. Everybody does it. The mind lacks proprioception.
What is remarkable, though, is people so urgently wanting to continue to play this game but to play it so hard, fast and dirty that they ‘own’ it—to play the game while denying the so-called other side the right to play the game. What you seem to not realize (nor does the other side) is that the difference between you and them is infinitesimal. You all—or should I say ‘we’?—are infected with the narcissism of small differences.
Perhaps I may exempt myself, after all, from YOUR narcissism of small differences because, as a Canadian, my small differences with ALL Americans is dearer to me than the small differences between American liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.
As a corollary to my Shatner hypothesis several comment threads back, it may also be observed that no thread is complete without the appearance of a self-righteous, uninformed Canadian.
Turing word “full,” as in “Sandwichman’s a full-on hoser, eh?
Jeebus, Sandwichman … take a breath and tell us what you really mean!
Sandwichman is a man after my own heart. Not all Canadians are such smug snarkfaces, but I love the ones who are. Jeff, you could be a hundred percent correct on your facts, but it just wouldn’t matter. We control the media, we control the minds of Canadians and half of americans. We’ve got Europe in the palm of our hands. Give it up, Jeff. You know you want to. You are getting sleepy, your eyelids are growing heavy, your pajamas are pulling you down on your mattress, you are letting go . . .
No Sandwichman, facts don’t change becuase of the perception of the consumer, no matter how much we want them too.
And saying that Jeff is glossing over facts on the other side seems disengenious, given his voluminous covergage of the issue and his great specificity.
He’s also allowed anyone to have a say in his comment section, and as of yet no one has pointed out anything he’s missed. Nor have they noted a failure by FEMA, though they have blamed many, many local failures on FEMA.
All the same, I’m willing to entertain the possiblity. Show us the facts he’s skipped or glossed over.
Sandwichman—With regard to your narcissism over small things, a hard-on doesn’t count as personal growth.
The quote above states that FEMA manages the ”federal response and recovery efforts.” The Feds weren’t responsible for Louisiana’s National Guard. The Feds didn’t keep the Red Cross out. The Feds don’t own over 20,000 buses in Louisiana. The Feds don’t run New Orleans’ police department. The Feds didn’t close the Gretna bridge.
Did Newsweek say where the New Orleans police are vacationing this week?
The fact staring the MSM in the face is that New Orleans is the quintessential Democratic city.
You know, it’s a good thing my sister married a nice Canadian guy who I like quite a bit, or I might begin to think that all Canadians are insufferable, self-righteous, pretentious jerks who have no idea how America works.
But my brother in law is a good guy, who buys good beer. So they’re not all bastards.
Blanco is a flippin’ idiot. She should have never been elected governor, except the people of N.O. overwhelmingly voted for her and put her in office.
Close!!
Sandwichman –
Please, by all means, provide us an example of that to which you’re referring.
And “The Corner” does suck. I’m still angry at them over their premature whining over the completely bogus exit poll results in November 2004. The sheer panic and defeatism packed in those posts irritated me to no end.
They haven’t gotten any better since then. They are the crying conservative corner of the internet.
sandwichman,
Most people here do NOT think that there is a small difference btween socialists who want to control every aspect of your life, and people who believe that freedom demands, beyond all things, responsibility for one’s own decisions and actions.
I answered Sandwichman a week or so ago, only he was in the form of gandhi. I’ll just repeat that here; if you would, simply replace Gandhi w/ sandwichman in your mind:
Shorter Sandwichman: Everyone’s just as prejudiced and blinkered as everyone else. But I won’t let that stop me from looking down on you.
B Moe said, “it is a pity the Dems aren’t as good at busing people out of the city as they are to the polls.”
Ohhh. So THAT’S what all those busses were reserved for.
B Moe, you bad! That’s gonna’ leave a mark.
Lost Dog, but then as much as some of us might wish for Republicans to live up to their rhetoric, we are not as bad off as Canada.
In Canada, the two largest parties are almost indistinguishable in the similarity of their platforms but the one that is a few millimeters more to the Left casts the one a few millimeters to the Right as the heirs of Mussolini and Hitler.
Brendan Loy has been taking aim at FEMA – he misses the mark, repeatedly, by failing to consider, among other things, that the US Corps of Engineers had a plan to repair the levees should they be breeched.
A reasonable interpretation of Bush’s ‘no one anticipated the levees would be breached’ could include ‘.. and that they would stay that way.’
The fact that the levees could not be repaired in a timely manner, per the preexisting CoE plan is due, per Brendan’s post,to the complete disintegration of locally-managed assets.
Brendan is among those looking to blame FEMA and by extension, the Feds for what turn out to be a failure of local assets.
As for Senator Landrieu’s comment about the local authorities being undewater and therefore not responsible.
Well, Senator, those officials didn’t get that way all at once.
Two points:
The first is that the morons screaming that the Federal government didn’t respond fast enough and didn’t do this or didn’t do that are the same one carping about somebody knowing what they are checking out of the library. Oh sure, the gummint should be the great and wonderful OZ, but don’t check on what books I read.
The second is my ire at Bobby Jindal – what a two-faced bastard he is. I don’t believe his little tale about the sheriff and the phone call to FEMA. The sheriff is a county official and therefore his/her first call would have to go to the county emergency operations center (EOC) and if they couldn’t prove what the sheriff needed, the county would bump the request up to the state EOC – that’s how it works. If the state didn’t have the ability to provide what the shefiff needed they could: (1) determine that it wasn’t a priority (among thousands of other requests,) or (2) send the request to FEMA for help. If Federal government had the capability to provide the they would arrange for it to occur. Of course, they could decide that the sheriff’s problem wasn’t as high of a priority as the thousands of others that they had. The short answer to this is that the sheriff had no business contacting FEMA directly and if I had been on the FEMA end of the phone I would have told the sheriff to buzz off and go through the proper channels. Jindal claims that the sheriff couldn’t e-mail the request because they “were under water and didn’t have power.” Hello numbnuts; have you ever hear of a battery powered laptap computer. Can you imagine the chaos if every damn sheriff, police chief, fire chief, mayor, township trustee, street sweeper, and yahoo in the four state area of the huricane could directly call FEMA and ask for support? I used to like Bobby Jindal, but here he placed local politics above the truth.
I’m beginning to think it’s hopeless, but many thanks for continuing to fight the good fight. But how is it that you are able to do this without having been initated into the august ranks of professional journalism? Since professional journalists with press passes and expense accounts value the sanctity of their professional ethics more than their citizenship, the title of Citizen Journalist would seem to be an oxymoron.
Jeff,
I would like to thank you and your commenters for the wealth of information they have provided about the preparation and response to Katrina. The MSM has been absolutely atrocious in delivering the facts but very successful in promoting their agenda. Worse than that, as others have noted, is that you have been something of a voice in the wilderness. There have been precious few others willing to engage the misinformation provided by the traditional media and opportunistic politicians.
Slowly it appears that the truth is beginning to migrate into the MSM reporting. But the most rabid anti-Bush/Republican/conservative/individualist members of that fraternity will not let up. They see polls showing support for Bush lagging and smell blood in the water.
Today I was treated to this gem in my local paper. (They don’t post wire stories on its website but I was able to find it elsewhere.) It discusses the rebuilding of NO. Mayor Nagin is mentioned exclusively in the context of planning for the future—his involvement with any part of the preparation and response efforts is completely ignored. FEMA, on the other hand, is derided as the “agency that so badly bungled the initial rescue efforts.”
BumperStickerist —
Loy is getting that bit about the earlier “breaching” of the levee from the Knight Ridder piece I appended to the previous post. My suspicion is—and I’ll ask all of you—that the terminology is getting confused, and the earlier reports were of overtopping from the storm surge, and that the actual breaching happened from the inside.
Is that correct, or am I just makings shit up now? I’m so tired I’m getting a bit delirous here….
O, Sandwichman –
he flings his snark at thee…
Assured and comfortable
in Canadian superiority!
(My favorite is near the end, when the performer’s voice really hits the rafters with
“He – Flings – His – Snark – At – Thee!” It’s just so, moving and all, eh?)
Suppose I were to suggest that I picture Sandwichman sounding like Richard Clarke? Now, what if I were to also suggest that you all -or should I say ‘we’?- stuff Sandwichman into that bottle of “New Orleans Smell” and mail it back to patience?
Would you be more inclined to ship him via Fed-Ex or USPS? Be honest.
Uh oh…the media’s sham meme “it all bush all the time” is starting to crack..
‘In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a “dead-head” train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. “We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm’s way,” said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. “The city declined.”
“By late Sunday, as millions of people in the Gulf region sought a safe place to hunker down, hundreds of shelter beds upstate lay empty. “We could have taken a lot more,” said Joe Becker, senior vice president for preparedness and response at the Red Cross. “The problem was transportation.” The New Orleans plan for public buses that would take people upstate was never implemented, and while many residents did manage to get out of town—about 80 percent, the mayor said—tens of thousands did not.”
yes it is true lefties, Bush and Brown were utter failures..They were WAY TOO SLOW to realize that the mayor and the governor were SO FUBAR in their duties that they couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of incompetence.
Jeff, you putz, you’re delusional.
But don’t take it personally.
You’re piecing together scraps of reports from the lying MSM and finding in them the pattern of the TRUTH. Such a beautiful mind!
Like I said, don’t take it personally, putz—we all do it. But it does become an epistemological question to what extent we’re aware that we’re doing it.
Take a deep breath and monitor your emotional response to what I’m saying (“fuck you” seems to indicate an emotional response). Try to figure out how much of that response has anything to do with what I’m saying and how much of it has to do with your own associations, projections and preconceptions. It’s hard to draw the line. But if you practice at it you can get better.
Which reminds me of a story: the rabbi Baal Shem Tov once stopped to watch a tightrope walker crossing a ravine. His followers wondered why he would waste his attention on such a profane event but he explained to them, “the tightrope walker is no different than any of us in his physical and mental capabilities. But through practice he is able to accomplish what none of us can. It teaches us how many chasms in life we could cross if only we built our faith through practice.”
So my question to you, putz, is: do you want to cross chasms or do you want to shout at the people on the other side, ordering them to cross? If it is the former, you will have to practice. If it is the latter, you will just make yourself hoarse.
Sandwichman, when the Mars Rover drives by, stick your thumb out. Maybe you can hitch a ride back to Earth.
guinsPen –
I think you should see if youy can get “Mayor” Nagin to deliver it.
Sanwichmans is creepy.
the WAPO article that details more of Governor Absento and amtrak, tansportation implementation NOT and other other deadly “blunders” here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/10/AR2005091001529_4.html
Wasn’t the bridge over the chasm was closed by the local police department?
You know what really bugs me about mainstream media bias? They way they assume that my brains are made of oatmeal. Viz:
“Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, …”
We’re talking about the person responsible for the disaster recovery efforts for millions of people, and Thomas describes her as though she were Jennifer Lopez’ personal chef.
Preview is my friend.
TW: I hit submit before the post was “ready.”
Sandwichman I asked before, I will ask again. Show me a fact Jeff has glossed over. I’m listening, but so far you’re short on facts and long on self abosoprtion. Sort of like the media, no?
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“My Mom never did any of those things when she was here!” Hilarious!
COOL !!!
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