The pain you feel today is the strength you'll have tomorrow.
Posted on 09/04/2012 1:10:16 AM PDT by GlockThe Vote
President Barack Obama took a veiled jab at his predecessor, George W. Bush, Monday during an appearance in New Orleans, where the former was touring damage caused by last week's Hurricane Isaac. Here's what Obama said, according to the White House transcript:
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
**********PEOPLE WERE DYING*************
A REAL man would have said Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! W. send in the Marines. Jeb send in the State Police. Cowards, both of them. They had the power to save lives, and they failed to act, PERIOD.
Were they more concerned for the dying or their political careers? Shame on them both.
Thank God for the U. S. Coast Guard! I don't know if they also had any legal impediments or not, but I doubt it would have mattered. SAVING LIVES is what they do.
Harsh? Yes, but TRUTH is paramount.
You don’t care for the Constitution, do you?
if you can — do a TO&E for the LANG Katrina.
THE LTC (hubby) kept track of it throughout Katrina, Blanco kept saying that her guard was in Iraq while all the time, she was holding back about 2000 guard. Her TAG was equally responsible.
He also taught CAS3 classes during and after Katrina, had a bunch of students from AR and LA guard. They really had some stories to tell
Her TAG was equally incompetent and just as reponsible
The moment Obama's people had control of the White House website on Jan. 20, 2009, they inserted language about Bush's failed promises to help the Katrina victims. (They later toned the wording down.)
That was very strange. I’ve tried to figure out who got paid, or at least what huge sum of money was transferred, or was his goal to end all ocean oil production?
The pain you feel today is the strength you'll have tomorrow.
Four days after the hurricane struck, Air Force One landed at New Orleans International Airport. The initial plan, he said, was for him to pick up Gov. Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and survey the damage via an aerial tour.
But he said the governor, mayor, and congressional delegation first wanted to meet with him on Air Force One.
“The tone started out tense and got worse,” Bush wrote. “The governor and mayor bickered. Everyone blasted the Federal Emergency Management Agency for failing to meet their needs. Congressman (now Governor) Bobby Jindal pointed out that FEMA had asked people to e-mail their requests, despite the lack of electricity in the city. I shook my head. ‘We’ll fix it,’ I said looking at FEMA Director Michael Brown. Sen. Mary Landrieu interrupted with unproductive emotional outbursts. ‘Would you please be quiet?’ I had to say to her at one point.”
Sen. Landrieu has said that she was emotional during her early meetings with Bush because the needs were so great and the response so inadequate.
Bush said he asked who is in charge of security.
“My question silenced the raucous discussion in the Air Force One conference room on Friday Sept. 2, 2005,” Bush wrote. ‘The governor is in charge,’ Mayor Nagin said, pointing across the dark wood table at Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
“Every head pivoted in her direction. The Louisiana governor froze. She looked agitated and exhausted. ‘I think it’s the mayor.’”
The former president also wrote about the failure to send in federal troops sooner. He said he pressed Blanco to allow federal troops into the city, but said she resisted. Also objecting was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“That left me in a tough position,” the former president wrote. “If I invoked the Insurrection Act against her wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African-American city.”
In the South, Bush wrote, that “could unleash holy hell.”
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/11/post_370.html
Well no criticism is not perfectly fair. Isaac was a cat 1 hurricane and katrina was an unprecented cat 4 hurricane catastrophe. Of course coordination is not going to be perfect when a whole city is destroyed. The criticism of FEMA was political and overblown. The real criticism should have been leveled at the local level. In any event this wasn’t a katrina event and obama was just making cheap political points.
Moreover, Isaac did everyone a favor by lollygagging around in the Gulf for days before making landfall.
Katrina both moved and intensified much more quickly, and the biggest LA’s Dem leadership ignored NHA (and Bush’s) warnings to evacuate.
Bush was in Louisiana FOUR days after Katrina made landfall. It took Barry0 a week to find time.
Blanco and her DNC Masters knew they had Bush in a pickle, it was the perfect example of “Never letting a crisis go to waste.”
I do, BUT in some cases you have to ignore the law. Man’s law is not absolute. I’m for right over wrong.
That is a truly ignorant (but overly emotional) post.
Were you somehow hurt by the storm and still looking for someone to blame?
Obama’s new bumpersticker: BUSH DID IT - VOTE FOR OBAMA!
This fool makes me sick...
wish I could say yeah.....but unfortunately NO
Katrina was in ‘05 and 7 months into Bush's second term.
Katrina: A timeline — proof the Federal response was NOT SLOW
White House.gov; multiple news & other sources ^ | 9/3/05
Posted on Saturday, September 03, 2005 10:44:11 PM by Wolfstar
After days of being harrangued by media reports to the contrary, this may seem like a radical notion, but...
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S RESPONSE TO KATRINA WAS NOT SLOW!
FACT: Coast Guard, U.S. Navy and other search and rescue units were in New Orleans, elsewhere in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Monday, after the storm passed out of the area.
FACT: The full extent of the devastation to the Gulf Coast region, and the levee breaches in New Orleans, were not known until Tuesday.
FACT: A convoy of about 500 buses reached the Superdome late Wednesday.
FACT: The first of 500 busloads of refugees reached Houston early Thursday.
What follows is a timeline, with news info, of key events related to Hurricane Katrina, beginning with another hurricane which struck the Gulf Coast just under one year ago to the day before Katrina. Hurrican Ivan raised all of the same concerns in Louisiana and New Orleans as it barrelled toward the Gulf Coast. It, too, was a killer hurricane. It exposed the severe shortcomings in Louisiana and New Orleans disaster planning. None, repeat, none of those shortcomings were corrected by the time Katrina hit Louisiana last week.
The Left can’t say they weren’t warned.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1476856/posts
Late Monday, a party atmosphere prevailed in the French Quarter, with the media reporting that the city appeared to have been spared the catastrophic damage predicted over the weekend. Even when the first ominous news reached the media — via a phone interview between CNN’s Rick Sanchez and the Vice President of Tulane University Hospital — that water was rising in the city, the media was still very slow to catch on to the danger. Even CNN blew what most likely was it’s most important exclusive breaking news in it’s history.
By Tuesday morning, August 30, as the extent of the flooding in New Orleans and damage all along the Gulf Coast became apparent, the media was STILL slow to grasp the significance of what was happening in New Orleans.
I still consider Blanco to be criminally negligent.
****
So do I. Her “emergency preparedness” advisor was Clinton’s head of FEMA. He is the person who advised her to stiff Bush’s attempts at getting the Federal agencies involved.
After Katrina, our US Coast Guard rescued tens of thousands of people from their homes/rooftops. That never gets mentioned when the Dems try to compare any other storm to Katrina’s devastation.
Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday. The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. State authorities suspected a political motive behind the request.
******
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
“Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?” asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.
Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html?pagewanted=print
“I need everything you have got,” Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.
In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. “Nobody told me that I had to request that,” Ms. Blanco said. “I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then.”
By Wednesday, she had asked for 40,000 soldiers.
In the discussions in Washington, also at issue was whether active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger numbers than the Guard.
By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne, which has a brigade on standby to move out within 18 hours, could not arrive any faster than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are specially trained and equipped for civilian law enforcement duties.
In the end, the flow of thousands of National Guard soldiers, especially military police, was accelerated from other states.
“I was there. I saw what needed to be done,” Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview. “They were the fastest, best-capable, most appropriate force to get there in the time allowed. And that’s what it’s all about.”
But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that active-duty troops were not summoned sooner, saying 82nd Airborne troops were ready to move out from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sunday, the day before the hurricane hit.
The call never came, administration officials said, in part because military officials believed Guard troops would get to the stricken region faster and because administration civilians worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to shoot looters.
Louisiana officials were furious that there was not more of a show of force, in terms of relief supplies and troops, from the federal government in the middle of last week. As the water was rising in New Orleans, the governor repeatedly questioned whether Washington had started its promised surge of federal resources.
“We needed equipment,” Ms. Blanco said in an interview. “Helicopters. We got isolated.”
Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was restored.
In a separate discussion last weekend, the governor also rejected a more modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the Guard and active-duty troops would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star general - but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana National Guard
That line of thinking is how dictatorships start, think Germany in 1933.
***Katrina was in 2005. There must have been a different disaster in 2004.***
Florida was criss-crossed by more than one hurricane in 2004. Bush spent the afternoon of his debate handing out supplies to affected Floridians.
His debate performance that night was flat and weak. I believe that he was exhausted and dehydrated.
Thank goodness Gore showed his true inner bully when he walked across the stage into Bush’s ‘space’ at the third debate. That cost him enough votes, I’m sure, for Bush to go on to victory.
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