Posted on 09/03/2005 7:13:20 PM PDT by ex-Texan
A WORD ABOUT FINGER-POINTING: I'm not going to get into every outrageous thing every lefty has said since the New Orleans crisis began. They're too numerous, too unreasonable and honestly, and besides, the left is really beyond the reach of facts now. Sniping back at every idiotic thing they have said this past week would probably fill up a good sized library, and be entirely futile. And I don't have to say much when that picture of those buses says just about everything that needs being said.
I will say this. I think it's tremendous that some bloggers have chosen to hold their fire on Nagin et al until the city's stranded have been evacuated. I don't begrudge those bloggers their decision not to push back against the left at all. But I'm more than a little tired of several major right of center bloggers positioning themselves as though they're above the fray and that they will always have time to address the left's insanities later.
That may not be true. There may not be time to address the left's lies later. Led by Jesse Jackson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and a slew of other major leftists who can't win political power the legal way, a larger than reasonable number of Americans have been sniffing revolutionary airs since the crisis started. They have tried to turn hurricane Katrina into a race war. They have blamed the crisis on everything from Bush hating blacks to the Iraq war to irrelevant budget cuts to whatever canard they could dream up. We should ask ourselves, to what end? Bush isn't running for re-election in 2008. He'll leave office soon enough. So why stir up so much animosity in the midst of crisis? What is their end game, or are they just driven by pure hate?
I don't know what drives these leftists, but I do know that mob mentality has pretty much taken over their thoughts and actions. When that happens, someone has to push back. That's what we've been doing on this blog, providing hard facts to show that the crisis isn't Bush's fault.
It's fine for some to maintain the moral highground. I'd just ask them not to criticize those of us who aren't afraid to get our hands dirty if it helps get at the truth and break the left's mob mentality. Somebody has to do it, or the lies stand and could quickly take on a malignant life of their own. Those high horse bloggers can sleep safely in their beds because rough bloggers stand ready in the night to visit truth on those who would lie us into harm.
DAVID BROOKS SEES IT TOO: The Bursting Point:
Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.
If we let Ray Nagin, Jesse Jackson, RFK Jr and the rest of the leftist mob define Katrina and tell us what went wrong, the coming big bang will be dangerous. These are dangerous people. They taste the air and sense blood. They feed on misery. They must be answered, they must be pushed back, or they will win.
And we will all, every one of us, suffer.
They just didn't follow it. So they were planning to fail. By "they," I mean pretty much every government official in Louisiana, and by "plan," I mean a signed-off set of procedures they were supposed to follow in the event of a catastrophic hurricane. You know, like the one that just hit. And by "fail" I mean complete catastrophic failure.
Here's the southeast Louisiana evac plan supplement, most recently revised in 2000. Go to page 13, read paragraph 5. It states:
5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.
Well, well. Can you say "smoking gun," Mr. Mayor? Mr. Ebbert? How about a smoking arsenal? I guess whether or not you decide to act is based on how you define "school and municipal buses" and "staging area." Or "hurricane." Or "mandatory," as in "mandatory evacuation."
Also see page 18, paragraph 2a 2 and 3.
Page 20, paragraph 3a 5.
Page 21, paragraph c 4.
Page 29, all of it.
And this is just one part of a 250-page state Emergency Operations Plan.
Consider this strange quote too:
Previous hurricanes evacuations in New Orleans were always voluntary, because so many people don't have the means of getting out. Some are too poor and there is always a French Quarter full of tourists who get caught.
The poor folk provide crucial votes for the local politicians, and the tourists provide the dollars, but yet before a major hurricane they can't even get a bus ride? If the MSM did not exist, President Bush might be seen as a hero now to the survivors of New Orleans for at least trying to force the local pols to get a clue and to think about the poor, sick and helpless for once when it's not election time. That's compassionate conservatism. He feels your pain before you do and tries to prevent liberals from inflicting it.
There is something very peculiar about a city and a state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans.
So when the situation goes south, the levee breaks and the people who should have been evacuated based on the plan are dying, these same officials who decided to improvise the whole thing now blame it all on the President who begged them to just get everyone the hell out of there already.
Nice.
(I added a couple more paragraphs above since posted just a bit ago. See below for further updates...Chris R)
MORE: Some thoughts on planning vs. failure from a Powerline reader who says the NOLA folks knew all about regular mandatory evacuations. Maybe that was before Mayor Nagin came along.
UPDATE: Yep, it looks like this will go down in history as gross (local) negligence:
A year ago, New Orleans reviewed its hurricane disaster plans after Hurricane Ivan gave the city a major scare forcing the evacuation of nearly 1 million people from the area.
What happened last September bears striking similarities to the problems encountered before Hurricane Katrina struck. The only difference was Ivan missed the city.
There were hours-long traffic jams. Those who had money fled, while the poor stayed. The warnings were the same: Forecasters predicted that a direct hit on the city would send torrents of water over the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste.
"They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed to do that," Latonya Hill, 57, told the Associated Press at the time. "If I can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I don't got a car. My daughter don't either."
Advocates for the poor were indignant in 2004 – just as they are complaining now.
"If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature," said Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU.
With Ivan, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then, just hours before the storm was set to hit land, they agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs.
Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome, but said the evacuation was the top priority.
"Our main focus is to get the people out of the city," she said.
But again, in 2004, no city or school buses were used to take people to safety.
Callers to talk radio complained about the late decision to open up the dome, but the mayor said he would do nothing different.
And, indeed, he didn't do much different last weekend before Katrina struck.
Even the problems that occurred at the Superdome this week had a precedent – during a threat by Hurricane Georges in 1998. An estimated 14,000 poured into the stadium, but theft and vandalism were rampant.
During the threat by Ivan, only 1,100 fled to the Superdome and they were supervised by 300 National Guardsmen, who were able to avoid major crime problems.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged after the Ivan near miss they needed a better evacuation plan.
Wow. Speechless.
As Instapundit has been reminding people, this storm wasn't a surprise. The blogosphere and Accuweather were on top of it very early.
With the local and state governments of Louisiana collapsing both tactically and emotionally, there was nowhere for that sense of frustration to flow other than toward the federal government. And there it will remain until the president succeeds in convincing the nation that he has taken personal responsibility for the management of this unprecedented disaster. At which point the responsibility might well begin to flow back again to the local and state authorities whose negligence in the days preceding the catastrophe border on the homicidally negligent. But not until then.
"Taking their cues" is an understatement.
They are basically repeating the stuff verbatim.
I have been making the same argument. We can't afford to wait while the leftists spread their lies. We have to counter them NOW, before they become accepted as fact.
If you look at American history, the left has CONSTANTLY lied and then transformed those lies into "history." Now that we have the means to show up those lies for what they are, we need to do it.
You are correct. My mistake.
I agree completely, Cicero. Those days are over.
This article needs to be sent to every Republican politician in the country. I said earlier that it should be GW that makes a demand for hearings post haste and that the networks be required to cover them commercial free gavel to gavel. If the facts are not laid out immediately then the "facts" will be created by the media and the left.
It's almost laughable.
I hear all the conspiracies and claptrap during the day from the leftist blogs and when I get home at night, the MSM is airing stories that follow the same "reasoning".
It's amazing.
This blogger is correct. The 'mayor' of New Orleans have stepped into Forrest Gump's famous pie. He is not going to be able to extricate himself from this HUGE mess of his own making. Their are rumors circulating in D.C. that some reporters are wondering why those buses were locked up. A few says ago, they could have rescued many hundreds of people trapped in the city. Today, they are rusting and rotting and leaking oil into the flood waters in New Orleans.
I couldn't agree more, Texasforever. I'll help spread the facts, and I hope others will do so as well. You are absolutely correct that the media will spin their own "facts" and all of those who do not do their own homework, will cheat off the page of the MSM and come away as dumb as they were before they took the test.
Thanks for an excellent post, ex-Texan. Please allow me to say, "BUMP!"
Agreed.
Since their level of comprehension is at the level of picture books, here is the picture book summary. (In case they're lurking):
"5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating."
It's not just the poor with the mass transit. All I hear from environmentalists is we should rely more on mass transit, help "Global Warming", etc... This is EXACTLY why I won't rely on mass transit. NOLA showed that when an emergency happens, mass transit means crap and you are SOL.
20 or 30 years ago, the left-wing media, i.e. the 3 networks, the NY Times etc. controlled the news. How the Bush adminstration "failed" to react to Katrina would have been a major story controlled by them.
Now things are different.
Now we have conservative talk radio, Free Republic and the rest of the conservative internet blogs.
Rather found out the hard way.
I so hope you are right.
bttt
This is absolutely a necessity. Rush told us a couple of weeks ago it was time to start pushing back and not just shrug the crap of the left off anymore. The Republican senators had better start refuting this nonsense and stop worrying if the MSM will like them or not. The MSM has a plan to do all they can to bring us down. I live in Georgia and my senators are Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson; I like them both and voted for them but I will send each of them a letter stating it is time for them to speak out against the MSM and race baiters Jackson, Sharpton, Cummings, the idiot mayor of New Orleans whatever his name is.
The left and the MSM --one in the same-- can not win in the arena of ideas. They have no chance and they know it so they have resorted to all out slander and lies. We must do what we can to fight back.
there are over 100 municipal buses in the one lot, and over 100 school buses in the other.
perhaps 250 buses all tolod, in two lots.
Nagin has some 'splainin' ta do
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