September 4, 2005
ALL THE BILE THAT’S FIT TO SPEW
The United States of shame (Maureen Dowd, New York Times, September 5th, 2005)
America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.President George W. Bush drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," he told Diane Sawyer.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell on Friday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people. [...]
It would be one thing if Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended the Broadway musical "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
When the president and vice president rashly shook off America's allies and America's respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.
When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line Friday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.
Think it couldn’t get any trashier than that? Sure it could:
More: Falluja floods the Superdome (Frank Rich, New York Times, September 5th, 2005)
As the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President George W. Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: It is immutable, and it is destiny.As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: He had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term2.
After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate ("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is FDR. And anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." [...]
But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going to have to ask if troops and materiel of all kinds could have arrived faster without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water for Bush to get back to Washington.
Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this disaster, the administration has again increased America's vulnerability to the terrorists it was supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three years before. Now, thanks to Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a simple and unambiguous message: Whatever the explanation, the United States is unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same time.
And more: Sanity submerged (The Australian, September 5th, 2005)
Almost as distressing as the scenes from New Orleans have been the attempts by some on the Left to exploit them in the culture wars. Those who parade themselves as compassionate souls exhibit a curious heartlessness in their rush to use a natural and humanitarian disaster as a pretext for bashing the US and President George W. Bush. According to an editorial in The Sunday Age, the frightening reality revealed by Hurricane Katrina "is that America has been humiliated by its inability to prevent, or then deal effectively with, a natural disaster in its own backyard; and, worse and more important in the long term, that the world's richest nation has been exposed, in a most brutal way, as a society still divided by race and possessing an underclass". How can any country be "humiliated" by its failure to prevent a hurricane? If the spurious answer is climate change, does anybody seriously believe that if Mr Bush had signed the Kyoto treaty upon assuming office in 2001, Katrina would not have happened?As for the suggestion the disaster has revealed faultlines of race and class in the US we didn't know were there: first, we did know they were there; and second, they are not so deep or intractable as to prevent the US being a magnet for immigrants of all races and classes. The fact most of the refugees we see on television are black has a lot to do with the fact that most of New Orleans's inhabitants are black. Those who are cynically suggesting race might be a factor in the delayed relief effort would instantly cry foul if their opponents replied that race might also be a factor in the looting and violence. And the notion that the shortage of immediate help on the ground was "all about Iraq" is beneath serious consideration. We know the same claims would not have been forthcoming if Katrina had happened on the watch of former president Bill Clinton, who also committed US troops to conflicts overseas. Such ridiculous claims only deepen the discredit of those who make them and deflect attention from the genuine mistakes of the past week, and the practical lessons they hold.
Posted by Peter Burnet at September 4, 2005 7:00 PM
Latest evidence that the right is lying or stupid if it says state and municipal government had to ask before FEMA could come in: this admninistration policy document from December
http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRPbaseplan.pdf
There are two steps here, for the slow and those instinctively worshipful of the Dauphin:
1) The Bush administration explicitly enunciated the policy that all "catastrophic incidents" were now a federal responsibility.
2) A catastrophic incident occurred, and the Bush adminstration took no responsibility.
Also worth watching: this video of the president of Jefferson Parish describing what it was like to have truckloads full of water at the border, and FEMA refusing to let them enter--a week ago.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/09/04.html#a4783
My advice: following the lead of the Fox newscasters on the ground, the Washington Times, and David Brooks, cut your losses and abandon your support of Bush before you further embarrass yourself.
Posted by: Rick Perlstein at September 4, 2005 7:27 PMAt least those who are "price gouging" are motivated by simple self-interest bordering on greed, but what excuse do these people have for engaging in the intellectual and political equivalents of looting?
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at September 4, 2005 7:46 PMGood advice Rick. I promise not to vote for him in 2008.
Posted by: AllenS at September 4, 2005 7:57 PMRick
Check out this Story Makes repairing levees rather difficult.
"NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans police said they shot and killed some gunmen who had fired upon a group of contractors traveling across a city bridge while on their way to make repairs. New Orleans Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people, killing five or six of them. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said there were 14 contractors on their way to repair a canal. They were traveling across a bridge under police escort when they were fired upon.
The Associated Press had reported that New Orleans police shot and killed Corps of Engineers contractors. But that report was later retracted.
The contractors were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to fix the 17th Street Canal.
The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River."
This occurred today I believe.
Posted by: h-man at September 4, 2005 8:05 PMRick displays one of the left's new themes - that because the DHS language says that DHS is responsible for handling federal emergencies that no one else is to blame for what happened.
This is twisted logic - the state and local authorities play no role in handling emergencies in their backyard? As anyone with knowledge of disaster situations will tell you the local police/fire/other are the first responders and are expected to handle things until the Feds get there.
Was Bush responsible for Nagin not evacuating NO? Was Bush responsible for Blanco not calling out the NG? Was Bush responsible for Nagin and Blanco not following up on recommendations from a 2004 drill that predicted this outcome?
As for your sources the assessment of the situation by the Fox reporters and WT (we'll have to wait to see Brooks next column) is shifting as it becomes clear the Federal effort is making a difference and that the early problems were due to a disintigration of the LA state and local process.
Posted by: AWW at September 4, 2005 8:40 PMThe Washington Post made a correction. AWW sticks to the script.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301680.html
Posted by: Rick Perlstein at September 4, 2005 8:58 PMWhat's interesting is for the past three years, so many on the left have been complaining that the Patriot Act has been used by George W. Bush to sieze control from local officials in order to give power to the administration as part of some plan to turn the nation into a police state. Now, the criticism of Bush is that he didn't proactively invoke the Patriot Act and empower DHS and FEMA to seize control from Nagin and Blanco before the hurricane hit, federalize National Guard troops and sent the U.S. military into New Orleans in advance of Katrina's arrive to basically turn the area into a police state.
Consistancy isn't their strong point, and they would be far better off focusing their attacks on specific area, such as FEMA and DHS officials going along with the media in believing the worst was over Monday evening when the levees had held at the time after Katrina was out of the area, when they should have continued to maintain warnings that worst might not be over. That's a legitiment criticism -- attacking Bush for not being a combination of Pinochet and Kreskin 72 hours before the hurricane arrived is nothing more than ranting in hopes people will one day hate the president as much as they do.
Posted by: John at September 4, 2005 9:11 PM"A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26."
What, exactly, does that have to do with what AWW said?
Meanwhile, those same Federal standards inform states not to expect Federal assistance for 72 to 96 hours. Not a big surprise to anyone familiar with the USA, but Rick clearly is not in that category.
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at September 4, 2005 9:47 PM
Hey, Rick~
What is the difference between an election and a disaster in a liberal city?
You only get bussed at elections!
Posted by: obc at September 4, 2005 10:15 PMobc:
That's b/c for big city dems it don't matter if the poor black folks they keep in the projects are alive or dead.
They'll all vote dem in the next election whether they're living or dead.
Hey Ricky baby, catch the ABC poll that shows no one's been paying attention to your ranting and raving about Bush? -- yet again.
How many bogus scandals have you folks tried to cook up since Dec 2000 and failed miserably? Anyone care to make a count?
Must be so frustrating.
No wonder ya'll are such angry bitter people.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at September 4, 2005 11:10 PMBTW: "lying or stupid"
How many times have we heard that before.
So original Ricky.
Isn't that the Dem response to anyone who votes republican.
And they wonder why they lose election after election.
Posted by: Jim in Chicago at September 4, 2005 11:12 PMSo Rick Perlstein, liberals now want the Federal government to stage thousands of troops outside every major city in America to act as first responders in case of a diaster? Can we expect liberal colleges to allow ROTC back on campus so we'll have leaders for the hundreds of thousands of troops needed?
Sure you want that many in your state? The military tends not to vote for liberals you know. You can expect whatever Congressional district they are stationed in to learn toward the GOP.
The levees which failed were consructed as a result of a 1977 consent decree brought about by a lawsuit by environmentalists. Greens sucessfully sued to prevent the construction of a project to protect New Orleans from a CAT 5 storm surge. Details here:
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=2491
Posted by: at September 4, 2005 11:18 PMMr. Perlstein:
Could any city in America continue to function (under any circumstances) if 2/3 of the force didn't show up, for whatever reason?
Would you have cheered if George Bush had arrested Nagin and Blanco on Tuesday? Wednesday?
The President will take a hit from this, but unlike the locals, he will recover. The overall mood of the country is not going to give sympathy to a place that shoots at rescue helicopters, emergency rooms, and Army repairmen.
The only real victim of the media hatred in New Orleans are the poor people who lived there, and the overall state of race relations in the nation. The losers will be the race hustlers and the Democratic party.
Posted by: jim hamlen at September 4, 2005 11:46 PMThe collapse of the New Orleans Police Department and the failure of the city to have an effective evacuation plan despite the fact that everybody knew that one was necessary and if there was not one, a human disaster would ensue.
Hurricane evacuations rarely go as planned. Storm tracks are hard to predict, and roads are not designed to handle the traffic flow, so huge traffic jams are a common result. In 1998 it took six hours for people leaving the New Orleans area in advance of Hurricane Georges to reach Baton Rouge, 80 miles away. The following year, Hurricane Floyd's constantly changing course spurred evacuations and bumper-to-bumper traffic on highways from Florida to North Carolina. ...
Like every coastal area vulnerable to hurricanes, south Louisiana faces these challenges. But the Louisiana delta also has it worse than other coastal areas. Because the entire region is susceptible to storm-surge flooding, hurricanes pose more danger to those left behind than in places where the coastal profile is higher. ...
"Evacuation is what's necessary: evacuation, evacuation, evacuation," Jefferson Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Walter Maestri said. "We anticipate that (even) with refuges of last resort in place, some 5 (percent) to 10 percent of the individuals who remain in the face of catastrophic storms are going to lose their lives."
The region's sinking coast and rising flood risk also make the task of getting people out harder than it is elsewhere. South Louisiana presents some of the most daunting evacuation problems in the United States because:
==============================================================
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 4, 2005 11:51 PM
Further to the above. No matter what the FEMA web site says, the mayor and the governor are still responsible for the saftey and well being of the inhabitants of their jurisdictions. And nothing relieves them from that.
Salus Populi Lex Suprema Esta.
The failures I mentioned above are grotesque. But the complete colapse of civil order should also be laid at their feet.
It is interesting to compare New York during the blackouts of 1976 and 2003. the first (I was there) was a catastrophe. The more recent was a love-in.
Urban cultures can be changed. Rudy Guliani changed New York's. LA politicians lat theirs go to hades.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 5, 2005 12:09 AM
Links to Corps of Engineers publication from 2004
In 1977, plans for hurricane protection structures at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass were sunk when environmental groups sued the district. ...
"A Category 5 hurricane hitting the city may be a once-in-a-500-year event ... A Category 3 like Hurricane Betsy in 1965, or less, is more likely, and the existing levee system should be able to handle a storm like that.
"But there are no guarantees. One failure or overtopping of a levee could be catastrophic."
With federal funding, a cost sharing agreement could be arranged with DOTD, and the feasibility study could proceed, taking about five years to complete, with another 10 to 20 years for construction.
===================
There was no technical fix in the near future. If work had started on the day GWB was inaugurated, it would still be 10 to 20 years before NO would have beeen protected from an event like this.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 5, 2005 1:18 AM
Consistency isn't their strong point...
Well no, actually. Anything that can be used to blacken Bush and his administration is a tool to be exploited. Absolutely anything. Consistently. Sickeningly. The hell with decency, benefit of the doubt. The hell with reason or with facts.
Know, however, that vileness of this magnitude comes at a price.
Just don't question their patriotism.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at September 5, 2005 2:27 AMThe lack of even so much as a few token words of affection for the folks in New Orleans demeans this forum and should shame its proprietors. For shame!
Posted by: Dutch at September 5, 2005 4:01 AMDutch
Thank you for summing it up for us. The sweet folks of New Orleans I'm sure will appreciate your "few token words of affection" as they drown in their own filth. So given your example, I just want to announce that, I ,h-man (h for humanitarian) "I feel their pain".
Gee thanks Dutch I feel good about myself already. To everybody else on this thread "shame on you". You're beneath comtempt. Shut up. Go to h*ll. I hope you all die, yesterday. How daarrree you.
Posted by: h-man at September 5, 2005 5:40 AMDutch:
Do you see the empathy you think we lack in what Rich and Dowd wrote? In the incompetent mayor's self-exculpatory, tearful rants? In the witless Governor's hand-wringing? In the feisty senator's physical threats? In the rage of the looters? In those who have decided (with poignant and wistful sadness, of course) America is rotten to the core? Where exactly would you direct us to for our moral tune-up?
Posted by: Peter B at September 5, 2005 6:51 AMPeter B
It's not very classy to point fingers. I see no lack of morality. Just bad judgment.
Posted by: Dutch at September 5, 2005 7:26 AMDutch:
If you are talking about us, I don't think so, or you wouldn't have used the word "shame". It appears you feel that more emotion and less argument would mark us as more moral. Do you gravitate to the politicans that emote the most?
Could you run that bit about pointing fingers by me again?
Posted by: Peter B at September 5, 2005 7:47 AMPeter B
Only the moral can be shamed. To respond by pointing at third parties is to absolve your own responsibility.
Posted by: Dutch at September 5, 2005 9:41 AMh-man
Selective juxtaposition can prove everything. Therefore it proves nothing. What are you trying to demonstrate?
Posted by: Dutch at September 5, 2005 9:45 AMDutch:
Compassion is best done in secret - I'm sure most on this blog have already given quite a bit to help the people of the Gulf.
Are deceit, exploitation, and race-baiting shameful?
Posted by: jim hamlen at September 5, 2005 10:24 AMDutch
That we (me) should be slow to characterize the people of New Orleans in a negative manner because it is based on questionable "facts" presented by the news media. Does that not mesh with your original point regarding showing "affection" towards the victims of the hurricane, rather than blaming or finger pointing? I think I will now stop attempting to agree with you, since apparently it's going to be more difficult than I expected.
jim
I stand humbled by your response. Pity about that nasty shot in closing.
h-man
Glad you're coming along.
Posted by: Dutch at September 5, 2005 10:53 AMUnnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
http://realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-9_4_05_RT.html
Posted by: Genecis at September 5, 2005 1:20 PMDutch is right--how dare you all not use every single comment thread to show your sympathy!
Posted by: Timothy at September 5, 2005 1:53 PMDutch seems to think that moral and emotional exhibitionism is a greater good than actually performing good works, or at least an adequeate substitute. Then again, a lot of people think that talking is the same as doing, and a lot easier.
And could someone point out Dutch's "few token words of affection for the folks in New Orleans [in] this forum", 'cause I sure can't see any, just a smug contempt for those who express opinions other than his own.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at September 5, 2005 3:06 PMRaoul
If a man can't exhibit common decency then what is left?
Posted by: Dutch at September 5, 2005 5:35 PMThe problem arises when people start thinking that "exhibit[ing] common decency" is sufficient, and absolves them of the responsibility for their actions, or even for taking actions, or converts bad actions into good ones. To use phrase from the math biz, it may be a "necessary condtion" but it is not a "sufficient condition,"
And by the way, could you once again post your "few token words of affection for the folks in New Orleans", 'cause I seem unable to find them among all your postings here. Show us by your example what we've done wrong and how it should be done. "Leading by example" is the way to shame people into better moral behavior, right?
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at September 5, 2005 11:07 PM