Posted on 01/21/2009 6:45:30 AM PST by Ebenezer
“Fecklessness, was the problem.. and, it originated with Kathleen Blanco.”
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Dey uz awl jist plum triflin’, triflin’ I tell yuh, ever las’ dadblamed one uv em! Warn’t nun uv em wurf a dime!
“4 days of food is the rule and it will keep you in good shape.”
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People ought to have that anyway, when I was a boy we hardly ever had less than 40 days of food on hand. If we had had to go that long we might not have had just what we wanted but we would not have starved.
Exactly. That bitch Mary Landrieu was right there with Blanko on tv before the storm blaming Pres. Bush for sending all of our National Guard to Iraq instead of using her big fat mouth to tell her constituents to get the hell out of the way of a Cat 5 Hurricane.
Yes, BLANKO’s response was horrendous because she refused to act. SHE had to request the federal response and she didn’t because she was playing politics with people’s lives. The bitch even had a trial run with Hurricane Ivan just a few months earlier. Remember New Orleans was under mandatory evacuation then too.
But surely President Bush ought to have known in advance that the media would use a poor response to the hurricane against him and that his reputation was on the line.
Was there any excuse for not knowing that he was going to be judged by a tougher standard because he was a Republican or knowing it and not putting in the extra effort?
Just on the basis of what I actually saw and heard at the time, voters were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt up until Katrina, and not afterwards.
That may have been wrong or unfair, but that's the way it was, and the public's reaction could have been predicted beforehand.
Talk to the people in FEMA. One of the problems with many agency appointments in many admin (Dems and GOP) is the tendency to overlook qualified govt people within to pick from outside to repay political favors. Brown is one of these picks. The hurricanes prior to Katrina, the gov of the affected states did their job and Brown basicly managed FEMA while his govt FEMA carried the ball for him, but Katrina was different. Like you said, the LA gov failed, the NO mayor failed and Brown (after getting a ton of calls from his FEMA subord) could not make a decision because for the first time he was called to the mat because events were occuring real time and SNAFUs occurred. The only people that acted decisively was the US Coast Guard (they did not wait for orders to swoop in and rescue people of the roofs of flooded homes) and the US military who took charge of the National Guard units once they got the go ahead, restored commo within 24 hours, got accurate intel from the air and used GPS equiped trucks to get to the Astrodome and other points of need. The reason these guys did well is because the chain of command were selected from experienced people in their area of expertise and past merit, thus they were able to make rapid decisions and waited for no one to solve immediate problems. You cannot get that from a director of horse auctions vs a FEMA subordinate who have 20+ years of experience in all kinds of hurricanes and diseasters. Brown froze when it counted and unfortunately GWB paid the PR price.
What an idiot this writer is, but he's indicative of so many of the folks suffering from BDS.
The Federal Aid WAS available, and HAD been for 36 hours PRIOR to Katrina making landfall. That was when President Bush called Gov. Blanco, offered the aid, and suggested that she evacuate as many people as possible. She and Mayor Nagin are the ones who dithered and didn't encourage more people to leave, and also didn't put enough relief supplies IN PLACE to account for all those who did end up staying.
After the storm, when the levees broke, all hell broke loose, too, and the place became worse than a third world country. There were so many rumors flying around in a media that was only interested in 'breaking news' that it actually delayed some of the aid that FEMA was trying to provide. FEMA wasn't being allowed in because of the rumors of folks firing guns at helicopters and attacking people in the streets. They were sitting on the ground, outside the city, waiting for the go-ahead from the LOCAL officials. And as the President rightly said, don't say the Federal Government didn't do enough to help those people, when thousands were plucked from their roofs and flown to safety, in the immediate aftermath of the flooding, by the US Coast Guard.
And I'm not making excuses for FEMA, they are a lumbering government bureaucracy, and are just not set up to meet anyone's long term needs without a lot of paperwork, but they don't deserve the drubbing they got in the media for the actions in New Orleans. In my opinion, when the President said "Brownie, you've done a heck of a job", he was right, given exactly what Michael Brown had to work with, in the way of local bureaucrats.
Folks fared much better, in the short term, on the Gulf Coast of MS and AL, because people there had evacuated, those who remained were better prepared, and local officials were of great assistance, and didn't make it difficult for folks to help in the clean-up after the storm.
*snicker*
Do you think the media would have given him the air time to do what you think he should have done. He couldn't DEMAND air time, he doesn't own the media. And it is the media that decides what is shown on the air at any given time. If they don't want to show what he says, they won't.
Easy to do when our side is public relations retarded.
Not necessarily limited to Bush and his Administration, the entire GOP continues to not fight back.
Haven't had an effective voice since Gingrich.
This won't be solved at the ballot box.
Barrack Obama is the legacy of George Bush, not Katrina.
A poor response? I saw him on TV begging LA to move their people out. He sent letters and forms telling them to 'just do this so we can help'. The state failed and President Bush was blamed.
Was there any excuse for not knowing that he was going to be judged by a tougher standard because he was a Republican or knowing it and not putting in the extra effort?
Yes...an honest man doesn't see the small evils, just the large ones.
The new Bush Admin battle is on - writing the history. We ain’t gonna let them win this one.
You’re right. My blood boils when they start blaming bush. I was there for Katrina - we could get local broadcasting on channel 4 on our battery TV. I saw the deer in the headlights trio - Blanco, Landrieu, Nagin totally lost. First off, everything was under water - my section at least a day. Blanco was suppose to request assistance but she didn’t know what end was up. When she finally did, we had ice, water, then food within days. Of course, Metairie was not under water like New Orleans was for such a long time.
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