Posted on 09/05/2005 5:20:58 PM PDT by ajolympian2004
Today, Monday Sept. 5th, we were just listening to the Tony Snow show on tape delay here on KCOL 600am in northern Colorado (Tony's show follows Sean's three hour program) and he was interviewing Geraldo Rivera live from somewhere in Louisiana. Geraldo mentioned a phrase to describe how a number of the victims of this tragedy died that I had never heard before. He said...
"People are being forgotten to death"
I completely agree! A significant number of elderly folks in the poor neighborhoods in the city limits of New Orleans who honestly could not help themselves died alone and forgotten.
I also agree with what Geraldo said regarding the fact that the people of our country are about to be shocked and horrified when the recovery teams start their door to door operations to retrieve those who did not survive this natural disaster.
If the mayor of New Orleans & governor of Louisana are not voted (or recalled) out of office for their deruliction of duty, and if President Bush doesn't fire the inept 'leader' of FEMA then there will no such thing as accountablility as a result of this event.
Kudos to Geraldo for giving credit to the fine men and women of our US military for stepping into the breach where no leadership existed in the aftermath of this tragedy and taking charge of the situation to get the job done.
I still can't believe that the governor of Louisiana released an official statement directing that the school buses of the public school system are to be used for evacuation of the folks at the SuperDome... two days after the buses were already submerged in flood waters... buses 1.2 miles from the SuperDome!!! ???
"Help us Obi Wan Guliani, you're our only hope".
All your bus are belong to us.
death by Geraldo
elderly folks in the poor neighborhoods in the city limits of New Orleans who honestly could not help themselves died alone
Well, I'm sure that more than one wished they could take
a few relatives along with them!
The decision by NOLA local government (Mayor Nagin) to save the buses instead of deploying them to evacuate the "poor", the infirm, those needing help, etc. with a category 5 hurricane approaching, has been a a major factor contributing to the chaos and has lead to many unnecessary deaths. The photos of the undeployed buses sitting in 4 feet of water a half mile from the Superdome tells a terrible story. Why do we not see these photos on the media and why are reporters not questioning this? Someone obviously made a decision that keeping the buses safe by not deploying BEFORE the hurricane would not risk damaging them so they could be used AFTER the storm hit, to evacuate those who weren't dead (as well as keeping the tourist cash flow, if the hurricane misses.). New Orleans has NEVER deployed their buses to evacuate the "poor" and helpless before any hurricane. They gamble to save their preciuos buses, and now, lose lives because of it. Criminal. And everyone is blaming Bush.
If he is so inept, why are the only hysterics about FEMA are coming from NO? Could it be the failure of the City and State to keep up THEIR end. I suspect that this will be the new Leftist line. "Everyone is to blame" so we can hold no one accountable. NOT going to fly. Left ripped the lid off this, let's just see what sliter out. I suspect here are a lot of high power Dem "Consultants" who don't want Congress looking at how all the Homeland Security money got spent in Democrat Urban strongholds
I'm sorry, but going house to house in a large city, looking for sick and dying people after a major disaster is not FEMA's job and never has been. Anyone who thinks FEMA is responsible for this just does not understand what this agency is supposed to do.
geraldus morbidus: death by stupification.
wasn;t he the rarely appointed third counsel during the Punic Wars?
Too bad the MSM is completely ignoring the fact that Katrina was catastrophic in Mississippi and Alabama as well. Why are they being completely ignored?
The whores are gratuitously interviewing each other - same words, different show; all for the sake of newsertainment.
There's been no substantial 'news' for a while now; but they're not letting that get in their way.
don't know, i'm not that old. ;)
Very true.
***
By the way............ this happens to the elderly in every neighborhood in the country every day.
Check in on the old folks in your neighborhoods. They will appreciate and you will too.
"Death by Geraldo"
NNNNOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I remember back during the invasion into Iraq, someone on here said, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or as the Marines are calling it, "Operation Goodbye Geraldo"
Too bad the MSM is completely ignoring the fact that Katrina was catastrophic in Mississippi and Alabama as well. Why are they being completely ignored?
I think one factor is that in Alabama and Mississippi they have local and state officials who have taken a leadership role in coordinating disaster relief operations.
That versus the lack of leadership in Louisiana which turned the situation there into a fiasco that the blame America firsters in the main stream media can use to support their political end game.
"...[tony Snow] was interviewing Geraldo Rivera live from somewhere in Louisiana...
The whores are gratuitously interviewing each other - same words, different show; all for the sake of newsertainment.
There's been no substantial 'news' for a while now; but they're not letting that get in their way."
There HAS been news. I sent the following to FoxNews, they totally rejected it. FoxNews is now a part of the MSM. I've posted this elsewhere, but it cannot be posted enough, especially about how Mayor Nagel let loose the prisoners of the jails on those whom he abandoned!
"An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005"
My best response is what Michelle Malkin wrote the other day (with excellent links):
During his visit to Mobile, Ala., on Friday, President Bush singled out Michael D. Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for praise:
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Really? "Brownie's" job is to direct the federal response to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Let's review his public statements during the past week:
- He admitted that he didn't act more aggressively because as late as last Sunday he expected Katrina to be a "standard hurricane" even though the National Weather Service in New Orleans was already predicting "human suffering incredible by modern standards."
- He proved himself utterly clueless about the disaster unfolding in New Orleans. He claimed that the federal relief effort was "going relatively well" and that the security situation in New Orleans was "pretty darn good."
- He blamed the flood victims in New Orleans for failing to evacuate on time, even though local authorities failed to make municipal vehicles available to residents who could not drive or did not own their own cars.
"It took four days to begin a large-scale evacuation of people stranded in the Superdome stadium and to bring in significant amounts of food and water to an American city easily accessible by motorway," the Observer notes. "Relief agencies took half that time to reach Indonesia after the Boxing Day tsunami. "
Although the delay was not entirely the fault of the Bush Administration, Brown's complacency clearly didn't help. And his bumbling statements after the hurricane struck have not inspired confidence.
This is not the time to give a weak performer the benefit of the doubt. The FEMA director's role in the ongoing recovery effort is too important to be entrusted to a clueless political hack with such poor judgment.
Rather than praise Michael Brown, Bush should fire him.
***
Update, 9:15am: Brendan Loy has a superb post about Brown's failure to anticipate the enormity of Katrina (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds):
No one -- NO ONE -- who knows anything about New Orleans's geography and topography and levee system would ever have thought for a single moment on Saturday and Sunday that Katrina, if it followed the predicted path, was going to be a "typical hurricane situation." Jesus Christ!! For how many years now has this article been out there?!? And this one? And many more like them? Did Michael Brown never read them? Was he not familiar with the science? Was FEMA's director unaware of what has been acknowledged for many years as the #1 most serious natural disaster threat in all of America?!?
9:45am EDT: Brown is being criticized on FOX News Sunday. "He has a lot to answer for," says Bill Kistol. "He clearly did not know what was going on."
Speaking of blame, why did it take Geraldo take until Wednesday or Thursday to get in theater?
O'Really was just interviewing Shepard Smith.
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