Right Wing Nut House

The images will be burned into the American consciousness for the rest of our lifetimes. Nearly 50,000 people in two different venues - the Superdome and the city’s massive convention center - living in squalor as desperate and violent as any third world refugee camp. One had to be reminded constantly that these were scenes taking place in a major, modern, industrialized city that just a few short hours ago had been a fully functioning metropolis with all the sanitary, communication, food distribution, and law enforcement facilities of any other American city.

A natural disaster had wiped all that off the face of the earth. And the tenuous bonds that linked the people to government, to each other, and to the faith that sustained them both disappeared in a matter of hours. In its place, nothing; no government and certainly no faith so that the lawlessness and suffering at both the Superdome and convention center became the norm.

What happened next was not the storm’s fault but the fault of government at all levels. It does no good to defend any of the major players, their staffs, or the bureaucracies who at first were confused, then panicked, and finally fell into a stuperous languour that was broken only after massive amounts of aid started to flow on Thursday in the late afternoon, more than 72 hours after the last hurricane force gust of wind moved inland from the stricken city.

Even then the suffering at the Superdome and Convention Center wasn’t over - but with the arrival of the National Guard in force as well as the long awaited and unconscionably delayed busses, there was light at the end of the tunnel. The story of what went wrong is a story of incompetence, stupidity, and just plain misunderstanding.

THE PLANS

All bureaucracies need a plan. When you have thousands of people working on a project like “Hurricane Disaster Relief,” everyone in every agency involved has to know where to go and what to do. If not, you get what occurred in New Orleans; a combination of chaos and bureaucratic inertia.

The problem wasn’t that there was no plan. The problem wasn’t that the plans in place weren’t followed. The problem was that there were three different plans being followed by three different bureaucracies with the result being that no one knew who was ultimately responsible for many different and very important things.

By ultimately responsible I mean that in the end, someone has to make a decision. Ideally, this would be the elected officials or their staff heads. The Mayor, the Governor, and the President all rely on their experts to recommend decisions that in a disaster, means the difference between life and death for thousands. What happened to this decision making process occurred because by the time the DHS National Response Plan was activated on Tuesday afternoon - a plan that was supposed to supercede the state and local emergency plans - it was too late to materially affect the conditions in the Superdome and Convention Center.

And because the state and local plans were incomplete and contradictory, people suffered needlessly. One assumes that this is why we have a National Response Plan in the first place; to make sure that local, state, and federal authorities are all on the same page.

There was no reason to delay in initiating the National Response Plan. In fact, as the Chicago Tribune points out in this article, the plan should have been initiated at the latest on Sunday August 28th. Late the previous evening, Blanco had requested that the federal government declare a state of emergency for Louisiana. Such a declaration, using the the correct language, should have automatically triggered a response predicated on a brand new DHS disaster designation, one that had never been used before; Katrina should become an “incident of national significance.”

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco submitted letters to President Bush on Aug. 27 and Aug. 28, well before Katrina’s landfall, asking for federal help. But the head of the Homeland Security Department didn’t designate the storm an “incident of national significance,” a post-Sept. 11 reform that would trigger the full weight of the federal government, until at least 32 hours after the storm roared ashore on Aug. 29.

(Note: The time period of 32 hours is certainly incorrect. In fact, it was barely 24 hours - about 9:00 AM on Tuesday when the designation was formally announced)

Why the designation was not triggered is currently a mystery. There is no doubt that the massive federal response we saw on Thursday should have arrived on Wednesday at the latest but for the delay in initiating the National Response Plan.

In the meantime, what was going on at the Superdome?

THE SUPERDOME

In 1998 when hurricane George threatened the Gulf Coast, 14, 000 people used the Superdome as a “Shelter of Last Resort.” At that time, the New Orleans authorities were reluctant to open the facility but eventually realized it was the only place to put the bulk of people who were not going to take advantage of the voluntary evacuation called for at that time. The people at the dome road out the hurricane in reasonably good shape with sporadic reports of theft and violence. They went home the next day.

There is every reason to believe that the New Orleans authorities did not anticipate the massive numbers of people who would take shelter in the Dome as a result of the mandatory evacuation order issued by the Mayor at 8:00 AM Sunday morning. And because of that, what would have been a desperate situation anyway became hellish.

First, the busses. The city’s Comprehensive Emergency Disaster Plan did not call for the evacuation of the poor, the elderly, and the sick from New Orleans in case of potential disaster. The Tribune points out exactly what the plan called for:

New Orleans’ plan for dealing with its poorest residents during a major hurricane essentially was to cross its fingers. After struggling to come up with an evacuation strategy, New Orleans officials announced in July that they couldn’t provide transportation out of town before a hurricane so residents effectively were on their own.

In fact, RTA busses were to run all day Sunday not ferrying people out of town but rather to the Superdome. The state plan also called for evacuation not out of town, but to “Shelters of Last Resort.”

What these two make very clear is that the press, the left, and racialists like Jesse Jackson have been barking up the wrong tree when it comes to saying that the President “didn’t care” about poor black people.

In fact, they should be pointing the finger of blame at the governments of the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana who deliberately planned for the poor, the old, and the sick to be left behind in case of a catastrophic hurricane.

Of course, the reason they planned that way is because there was no earthly way possible to get that many people out of the way of the storm. Could they have evacuated some of them? Of that, there is no doubt. But the question needs to be asked; where? All other designated shelters were full and the state was already opening its less desirable secondary shelters. These secondary refuges were largely without supplies of food and water and would have been unsuitable for long term use.

When Governor Blanco was running around frantically on Wednesday night looking for buses to evacuate the Superdome (it is not clear if she knew about the Convention Center refugees at this point) and telling the National Guard to commandeer school busses for the trip to the Astrodome in Houston, Mayor Nagin was declining the buses on the grounds that they didn’t have bathrooms - a logical position since many of the evacuees were old or sick. And FEMA, who had been promising 500 buses for going on 24 hours had nary a bus to show for those promises. One must assume that Director Brown either had no idea how long it took to get 500 buses to New Orleans or someone was giving him erroneous information.

Even if the federal government declared Katrina “an incident of national significance on Sunday, there is no possible way anything could have been done to evacuate all the old, poor, and sick people who lived in New Orleans. And it will be worse in other, larger major cities. New Orleans has a population of only 475,000. Can you imagine having to evacuate a city the size of New York because of a threatened terrorist nuclear attack?

So the people would be stuck in the Superdome. What happened at the Dome was a direct result of the incompetence and stupidity of local authorities.

People began filing into the Dome at 8:00 AM Sunday morning. There were between 300-500 National Guardsmen along with approximately 150 police from various jurisdictions. There was food and water for approximately 15,000 people for two days. Given the number of people who had taken refuge during hurricane George, this sounds reasonable.

Except it wasn’t reasonable and this wasn’t hurricane George. The Mayor had been told the night before by National Hurricane Center Director Mayfield that this was the worst case scenario hurricane that they had long feared and that water would at the very least “overtop” the levees (not breach. No one at any level of government anticipated a breach or total break in the levees. Certainly not one 200 feet in length). At that point, Mayor Nagin knew that the people in the Superdome were going to be there a while.

How long is a legitimate question that must be asked at any hearings that are held on the disaster response. Since the federal government planned on having the Red Cross handle shelter relief as they usually do and since the Red Cross was barred by state DHS authorities from coming to the aid of people in the Superdome because these same authorities feared that people wouldn’t leave the city (or that people would even come back to New Orleans if they knew there was food and water) a large measure of blame for conditions at the Superdome rests squarely on the shoulders of the locals. Local plans even called for “port-a-potties” to be delivered to the Dome in anticipation of a loss of water. This was never done.

Part of the discomfort in the Dome and Convention Center was due to the lack of toilet facilities after the city’s water system went down late Wednesday. The city’s hurricane plan calls for portable toilets at shelters, but none ever arrived. Nagin said his understanding was that the National Guard was in charge of providing them.

Also, he added, “Our plan never assumed people being in the Dome more than two or three days.”

But perhaps more than anything, this quote from the Mayor reveals what the real problem was; unreasonable expectations:

This is ridiculous,” he said. “I mean, this is America. How can we have a state with an $18 billion budget and a federal government with an I-don’t-know-how-many trillion dollar budget, and they can’t get a few thousand people onto buses? I don’t get that.

First, it was quite a few more than “a few thousand” people. The number is over 75,000 evacuated with another 15-20,000 still to go. To believe that enough busses can be magically transported to a flooded, waterlogged city in a matter of hours to evacuate even just the 50,000 people in the Superdome and Convention Center - many of them sick, dying, and elderly - shows a man who was completely out of touch with reality and who was overwhelmed by events.

THE CONVENTION CENTER

There are no words to describe the stupidity that resulted in the disaster that occured at the Convention Center. Every major media outlet including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the AP, and the Times Picyune of New Orleans agree; the convention center was not on a list of approved shelters, no plans were made to house people there, and no one ever told FEMA that there were 20,000 (or more) people in and around the convention center to begin with.

Thus did little details slip through the cracks.

What’s even more bizarre is that evidently, no one at FEMA or DHS watched television or read newspapers for 2 days because on Thursday morning, when DHS Director Chertoff was interviewed on NPR he claimed not to have heard that there were refugees at the Convention Center.

But there were and they had been arriving since Tuesday morning.

During the early evening on Monday as more and more people who were flooded out of their homes and could walk made their way to the Superdome, it became apparent that the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the huge building would necessitate opening another shelter. The massive Convention Center would seem to fit the bill. According to this Times-Picyune story, “city officials” were considering it as early as Tuesday morning:

City officials said they might open the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as a temporary refuge to shelter an estimated 50,000 people made homeless by the storm.

Next, we find that Fish and Wildlife employees are directing people to the Center on Tuesday morning:

A man in a passing pickup truck from the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries finally directed Wallace and the 50 other evacuees under the overpass to the convention center.

But they would find little relief there.

New evacuees were being dropped off after being pulled from inundated eastern New Orleans and Carrollton, pooling with those who arrived on foot. Some had been at the convention center since Tuesday morning but had received no food, water or instructions. They waited both inside and outside the cavernous building.

The influx overwhelmed the few staffers and Louisiana National Guardsmen on hand.

In fact, there was literally no one there. Those few staffers left early. And it’s unclear whether or not there were any National Guardsmen at the Convention Center in the first place.

Did Nagin himself know about the evacuees at the Convention Center? Why yes he did! He even paid them a visit on Wednesday:

“I went there,” he said. “I went through the crowds and talked to people, and they were not happy. They were panicked. After the shootings and the looting got out of control, I did not go back in there. My security people advised me not to go back” after Wednesday, he said.

So the Mayor knew. Did he bother to tell the Governor? Judging by the fact that Blanco called for an evacuation of the Superdome on Tuesday night without mentioning the Convention Center as well as the fact that she visited the Dome twice on Tuesday, one can draw a reasonable conclusion that the Governor was completely in the dark about any evacuees at the Convention Center:

Gov. Kathleen Blanco called for an evacuation of the 20,000 storm refugees from the Superdome after she visited the hurricane-damaged stadium Tuesday evening for the second time of the day.

She set no timetable for the withdrawal but insisted that the facility was damaged, degrading and no longer able to support the local citizens who had sought refuge in the Dome from Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s a very, very desperate situation,” Blanco said late Tuesday after returning to the capital from her visit, when she comforted the exhausted throngs of people, many of whom checked in over the weekend.
It’s imperative that we get them out. The situation is degenerating rapidly.”

Who else knew about evacuees at the Convention Center? The National Guard knew:

The people tell us that National Guard units have come by as a show of force. They have tossed some military rations out. People are eating potato chips to survive and are looting some of the stores nearby for food and drink. It is not the kind of food these people need.

Evidently, there were a whole slew of people in officialdom that knew about the crisis at the Center but failed to do anything about it. Events were quite simply outpacing the bureaucracy’s ability to deal with them.

At around 11:00 AM on Thursday morning, FEMA Director Brown finally acknowledged the human catastrophe at the Convention Center.

We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.

Since there were reporters on the scene at the Convention Center since Tuesday afternoon and all day Wednesday CNN had been showing the horrific scenes of chaos and desperation, one wonders again if anyone at FEMA had a TV (preferably 3) turned to the cable news outlets.

Ultimately, the decision to open the Center in the first place without telling either Blanco’s office or FEMA ranks as the most catastrophically negligent action during the entire botched relief effort. And for that the Mayor is mainly responsible.

Did incompetence play a role in FEMA’s belated response? Jeff Goldstein has made an eloquent and spirited defense of the federal response to the disaster and argues that it represents the most successful response to a natural disaster in history. I can’t argue with that…too bad it started about 24 hours too late. Whether incompetence or sheer bureaucratic inertia had something to do with that, let’s hope the hearings into the disaster response will reveal the truth.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has some interesting “Post Mortem” links on Katrina including Jeff Goldstein’s Newsweek takedown.

America is a country constantly moving downhill. Looking neither right nor left and definitely not backward, the pace of American life is the wonder of the world. Usually derided by Europeans, it has fascinated most of the rest of humanity that Americans can move and adapt so quickly to changing times. It has allowed us to accomplish truly amazing things without giving the slightest thought to the past. To do so would force us to pause in our headlong rush toward the future and think of where we’ve been and how we got where we are.

This myopia has had some very strange consequences. For the first 85 years of our existence, it allowed us the to concoct the perfectly reasonable fantasy that we were a nation that stood for liberty while holding in bondage millions of human beings. This schizophrenia was best summed up by British author Samuel Johnson who is reported to have written to a friend prior to the American Revolution “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?”

It took a civil war that cost more than 600,000 lives to wipe the stain of slavery from our Constitution and several generations more to make a beginning toward bringing to life the words in our Declaration of Independence that promised equality for all men. All the while, Americans continued with their mad dash toward an unknowable destiny with only faith in progress and a belief in the righteousness of American ideals as a guide. Studying America’s narrative was something you were forced to do in school or a pastime for professors toiling away in the dusty halls of academia. It was not for those who were more eager to make history than to examine its subtleties for any lessons or insights.

This is why American myths have always been so important. They have allowed us a touchstone with the past without giving the consequences of our place in history much thought. This is virtually unheard of elsewhere because mythology is usually associated with the distant past, hearkening back to a time before history was written down and hence, dependent on storytelling or song singing. The Robin Hood myth in Great Britain is a good example of myth creation by such a method. The medieval troubadours who went from village to village singing about Robin Hood were unconsciously creating a national data bank of mythology from which ordinary people could draw on for inspiration. Never mind that the historical character from which the myth is drawn was very different than the heroic figure enshrined in the hearts of the British people. That fact was not the point of the myth.

But America, by comparison, is a very young country. Our myths are created instantly. They go from news, to history, to myth in the blink of an eye. The power of the myths surrounding George Washington can never be underestimated not only for their impact on how we look upon Washington today but also how we define our founding as a nation. Less than a year after Washington’s death, Parson Weems published “The Life of Washington”, a book that is so laughably inaccurate about the real Washington that it did a huge disservice to our understanding of the man and his times. For instance, the myth of the cherry tree and Washington saying to his father “I cannot tell a lie” helped place Washington on a pedestal so high that when other, more scholarly books were published, they seemed to diminish his accomplishments and character.

The same holds true for other Americans whose lives have achieved mythical status like Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln whose real life deeds and attributes outstripped the myths created to lionize them. Even the historical impact of events like the winter at Valley Forge have suffered because of this peculiarly American custom of nearly instantaneously mythologizing our history.

So it is with 9/11. That date represents the great divide in American politics and culture. One one side are those who see that day as a tragedy. Others see it as an act of war. Both have embraced the power of myth to explain and justify their politics.

The myth that “the world was with us” after 9/11 was one advanced shamelessly by the Kerry campaign during the election last year. In fact, most Americans embrace this myth because of the outpouring of sympathy from around the world for the victims in the aftermath of the attack. However, even a cursory look at what was going on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 shows that far from being with us, the rest of the world pretty much took the Ward Churchill view that we had it coming.

The confusion comes as a result of the rest of the world - including friends like Great Britain and Canada - clearly delineating the difference between feeling sympathy for the American people and exhibiting enormous satisfaction at the blow to the American government. At the same time that the British people were laying wreaths of remembrance in front of the American embassy, former American ambassador Philip Lader was almost reduced to tears on the BBC program “Question Time” as a result of being nearly shouted down while trying to defend American foreign policy. The ferocity of the barbs and criticisms directed toward Ambassador Lader just two days after the attacks resulted in an unprecedented apology from the BBC for not taping and editing the show.

Even more remarkable was the reaction to the headline of a front page editorial in the French newspaper La Monde entitled “We are all Americans.” Constantly cited as “evidence” that the world stood shoulder to shoulder with America following the attacks, the editorial, in fact, skewers American foreign policy and the American government while blaming our “unbalanced” middle east policy for the tragedy.

From Arabs dancing in the streets of refugee camps in the West Bank to Iranians shouting Bin Laden’s name in adulation on the streets of Tehran, to even Canadians booing the American national anthem at a baseball game shortly after the season resumed, the myth was nevertheless created that world solidarity with America was undermined by the policies of the President. Despite all evidence to the contrary, even those who support the President believe in and perpetrate this myth so ingrained into the 9/11 narrative it has become.

Other myths surrounding the attack are more conspiratorial rather than historical. The shooting down of Flight #93 is one such conspiracy myth that refuses to go away. More recently, former Bush Administration economist and retired professor Morgan Reynolds has kept alive the myth that the World Trade Center towers were felled by demolition rather than a terrorist attack. These kinds of myths are common following world-shattering events in that they seek to put into context things that literally cannot be contextualized. Rather than grasping the historical significance of so large a tragedy, the conspiracy monger trivializes the event by positing fantastic plots that not only place the story teller in a privileged position of “being in the know” but allows for an emotional frame of reference that can give meaning to what amounts to a meaningless tragedy.

The history of 9/11 is still being written. The farther the event recedes into the past, the more we will mythologize that terrible day. It says something that is perhaps unflattering about America that this will be so. But it also indicates how dynamic our society truly is and how the power of myth continues to shape our politics and culture in ways that are almost unfathomable.

See also Alexandra’s “Remembrance of Things Past.”

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

WELCOME RUSH LIMBAUGH LISTENERS!

Hope you set a spell, relax, and read a few items. May I suggest you browse my History post archive?
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For the left, the aftermath of Katrina has proven to be a godsend. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen them this happy since Hugo Chavez hornswaggled Jimmy Carter into certifying his victory in a recall vote last year. There’s just something about communist thugs that brings a smile to the face of an American lefty and makes their hearts go pitter patter.

But even a victory by “The Laughing Goat” ( La Cabra que Ríe) couldn’t possibly gladden the hearts and warm the cockles of liberals like the prospect of celebrating…what? Well, there’s that drop in the President’s poll numbers. And then there’s…let’s see. Oh! Did I mention the drop in the President’s poll numbers?

Yes, these are heady days for our left wing friends. The fact that their celebrations are taking place as a direct result of the distress, suffering, anguish and death of tens of thousands of their fellow citizens seems to not be of much concern to our morally superior betters. In fact, it has emboldened them to advance every crack pot theory on race and class that has poisoned American politics for going on forty years. One could say the left is dancing on the graves of black people, celebrating the exploitation of a political opening brought about by the incompetence of relief efforts in the largely black neighborhoods of New Orleans except for one thing; most of those graves are empty at the moment because the future les habitants haven’t even been plucked from the floodwaters yet.

But why let a small detail like common decency spoil a good party? It’s Mardi Gras in September in the Big Easy and liberals are dancing the Cajun Reel with the thousands of grinning skeletons who very soon now will start filling up the temporary mortuaries set up to receive them. The fact that we will be denied the edifying spectactle of watching the gruesome task of retrieving these corpses has now led to charges of a “cover-up” - as if focusing a camera on the bloated, blackened remains of our fellow citizens should be made into some kind of reality TV show. Kind of a Survivor meets The Great Race high concept production. Why, the syndication possibilities are staggering.

Consider the hue and cry that went up in the hours and days following September 11, 2001 about how we shouldn’t be showing images of the tortured souls as they jumped to their deaths from those doomed towers.Or the unbearable, constant replaying of the horrific scenes of destruction as the towers fell. The rational at the time was that such appalling images would breed anger and hate. But the anger and hate that would be bred by showing the maggoty corpses left behind by a man-made disaster are perfectly alright - as long as that anger and hate is directed at George Bush. After all, from the left’s perspective, if you can’t use images of a rotting cadaver for the ultimate good of making George Bush look bad, why bother?

That’s all they have to live for, of course. That and the possibility that the American people will become so outraged at the President’s choice of Michael Brown to head up the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that they will rise up in their righteous anger and smite the Republicans a mortal blow at the polls next year. The elevation of horse show impressario Brown to the lofty perch of FEMA Director may have been an unconscionable and unfathomable act of stupidity on the part of the President. But so was having Ron Brown’s Commerce Department give technology transfer waivers to American companies so that the Chinese army could improve the accuracy of thier ICBMs (Clinton). Or selling arms for hostages (Reagan). Or putting price controls on crude oil (Carter). Or putting wage and price controls into place when inflation was at the “astronomical” rate of 4.7% (Nixon). Or supporting Cuban ex-pats in a doomed-from-the-start effort to take back their country from Castro (Kennedy).

All President’s make huge mistakes. Some lead to economic distress. Others actually cost lives. At this moment, despite the left’s charges that Bush is insensitive, I doubt whether the President is getting much restful sleep these past few nights. If there is anything at all that the American people have sensed about this man on a personal level, it is a sense of a simple, faith-based compassion for his fellow citizens. Does he recognize personal responsibility in his disasterous choice of Michael Brown as FEMA Director? Firing the incompetent fool would be a good indication one way or another.

But giving Master Brown the heave-ho won’t satisfy the baying hounds at the President’s doorstep. The ghosts of New Orleans may indeed haunt Mr. Bush’s Presidency from here on out if he doesn’t act soon to counter the impression that the Federal government isn’t on top of this relief effort. It isn’t enough to promise money and support for the half million displaced people whose lives have been shattered by the storm. This is a given in America. It’s doing what’s expected.

What the President needs to do is the unexpected. Americans will back a President after he makes a mistake only when he admits the error in public and asks for forgiveness. Reagan and Clinton both made monumental errors in their second terms and yet finished their times in office with the strong support and even affection of the American people because they recognized their mistakes, apologized for them, and moved on to bigger and better things.

Following Iran-Contra, Reagan negotiated the first real reductions in a class of nuclear weapons when he signed a treaty with the Soviets eliminating medium range missiles from Europe. And following Clinton’s apology for lying to the American people about “that woman,” and his subsequent impeachment, he seemed to gather new energies which allowed him to finish his term with approval ratings over 60%.

Clearly, this is a mea culpa moment for Bush. But whether his political enemies, who now have the upper hand, allow him the luxury of such a course of action is problematic. The left’s continued glee at having the President on the run will last only as long as the President stubbornly refuses to make things right with the American people.

Things went horribly wrong in New Orleans. And while the inexplicable gaffes of the disaster tag team of Blanc-o-Nagin will ultimately come to be seen as at least equally responsible for the tragedy, the American people want an acknowledgement of what they’ve seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears; the people that the President dispatched to deal with the relief efforts failed miserably. They want the President to take ultimate responsibility for this and they want it done soon. Any delay will be seen as playing politics and that’s something the American people have no patience for right now.

Do the right thing, Mr. Bush. And do it now.

I’d like to thank all of those - both right and left - who generously gave of their time and expertise to help me in compiling the Katrina Response Timeline. I feel that it represents a good starting point in trying to understand what went wrong in the relief efforts.

To those who expressed anger - again both right and left - at either things that were put in the timeline or things left out, I would only say that if you think you can do better, be my guest. I certainly don’t claim to have a corner on wisdom or truth (except when it comes to football prognosticating; in that, I am God) so have at it. The further we get from the disaster, the more information will come to light and either make the timeline irrelevant or enhance it’s viability. That is the nature of history and I fully accept the idea that much of the work you and I put into this project will be superseded by other facts.

To those of you who tried to get through to this site earlier but failed because of the problems with my hosting company, I would like to apologize again for that. I am in the process of changing hosting companies and can assure you that I value the reliability of accessing this site as you do. I am confident that no such problem will occur again.

And for those who came for the timeline, browsed through some of my other postings and would consider a return trip to the House, I’d like to welcome you. May I recommend a trip through my History archives? In my humble opinion, they contain the best the site has to offer.

Again, thanks to all.

Rick Moran - Proprietor

The results are in from this week’s Watchers Council Vote and the winner in the Council category is the incomparable Dr. Sanity for her excellent post “A Nation that Stands for Nothing deserves a Media that Believes in Nothing.” Finishing in at tie for second was yours truly with my article “The Handle of Faith.” Also in second place was AJ’s chilling “Iraq Connected to 9/11” and the Glittering Eye’s think piece “What’s a Credible Source?”

Finishing on top in the non-Council category was the runaway winner “Gates of Fire” by Michael Yon.

If you’d like to participate in this week’s Watcher’s Vote, go here and follow directions.

According to a CNN-Gallup poll released yesterday, the American people are in no mood as yet to blame President Bush for the relief fiascoes that occurred in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Nearly twice as many people - 25% to 13% - blame the disaster debacle tag team champions Blanc-o-Nagin for the unbelievable number of screw-ups, let downs, and incompetent decision making as blame the Bush-led undynamic duo of FEMA Director Brown and DHS Secretary Chertoff. And showing a perspicacity not evident when listening to people in Washington or Baton Rouge, 38% of the American people blame Mother Nature or, specifically, no one at all.

Never underestimate the intelligence of the American people.

Only 35% think the President did a “great” or “good” job. Another 21% believe he performed neither “good” or “bad.” On the other hand, 42% believe he did either a “bad” or “terrible” job which would seem to indicate the majority of independents believe the latter.

Not very cheery numbers for the White House…but also shows the stupidity of the Democrats who have been trying to portray the relief effort as a disaster almost before the last hurricane force gusts of wind from Katrina died down in the Gulf. There has been no discernible backlash yet against the Democrat’s blatant attempt to politicize the relief efforts while people were still stranded on rooftops and the law of the jungle reigned in the Convention Center. That tally may come when many more details are revealed regarding the inability of local DHS officials to work with FEMA employees.

What is slowly emerging from the rubble in New Orleans may in fact shock the American people out of the poisonous partisan warfare that has gripped the nation for more than a decade. The question will inevitably be asked: Was part of the reason for friction between state Homeland Security Department officials and national FEMA employees the result of partisan party politics?

The state government is Democratic. The national government is full of Republicans. Could there have been a level of distrust regarding the motives of each side which played a deleterious role in the disaster? A possible hint of this was revealed by Mayor Nagin in an interview with CNN American Morning on Friday, September 2. Nagin was talking about a meeting the President had with Governor Blanco in which he offered to have the federal government take over the relief effort:

NAGIN: They both shook — I don’t know the exact date. They both shook their head and said yes. I said, ‘Great.’ I said, ‘Everybody in this room is getting ready to leave.’ There was senators and his cabinet people, you name it, they were there. Generals. I said, ‘Everybody right now, we’re leaving. These two people need to sit in a room together and make a doggone decision right now.’

S. O’BRIEN: And was that done?

NAGIN: The president looked at me. I think he was a little surprised. He said, “No, you guys stay here. We’re going to another section of the plane, and we’re going to make a decision.”

He called me in that office after that. And he said, “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor.” I said — and I don’t remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

S. O’BRIEN: You’re telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?

NAGIN: Yes.

S. O’BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?

NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the — I was abdicating a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.

S. O’BRIEN: And the governor said no.

NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn’t happen, and more people died.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Governor didn’t trust the President not to use the federalizing of the relief effort to highlight the national response to the tragedy at the expense of state efforts. Nor could the President take much more of the idiotic finger pointing on the part of Mayor Nagin who seemed to be spending more time giving interviews to the press saying nothing was being done than he did trying to recall the 500 or so New Orleans city policemen who had vanished into thin air once the storm struck.

Once the complete picture emerges regarding the scope of this tragedy, those numbers may jump substantially one way or another. For now, the American people, as usual, are showing themselves to be much more grown up than the idiots who are trying to make one side more culpable than the other.

In what has to be one of the most egregious examples of ignorance (or deliberate bias) ever demonstrated by a major media source, the Associated Press has released an article that takes FEMA Director Brown to task for failing to bring the agency’s victim relief and community outreach paper shufflers to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

The government’s disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security workers to support rescuers in the region - and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to “convey a positive image” about the government’s response for victims.

“Among other duties”…HMMM. But what would be their main duties? Unfortunately, we don’t find this out until several paragraphs later:

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown had positioned front-line rescue teams and Coast Guard helicopters before the storm. Brown’s memo on Aug. 29 aimed to assemble the necessary federal work force to support the rescues, establish communications and coordinate with victims and community groups, Knocke said.

Instead of rescuing people or recovering bodies, these employees would focus on helping victims find the help they needed, he said.

THESE EMPLOYEES HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH RESCUING VICTIMS TRAPPED ON ROOFTOPS OR BRINGING FOOD TO THE HUNGRY OR WATER TO THE THIRSTY!

Instead, these 1,000 FEMA paper shufflers were responsible for helping the shocked and reeling citizens in filling out the massive number of federal forms necessary to get disaster relief.

It’s like this: Once upon a time, there was a little, tiny bureaucracy in the United States Government called the Federal Emergency Management Agency that would move into a disaster area after the clean-up was underway and open temporary offices where people could come and get help in trying to get their lives back together. In their benign munificence, the federal government would supply you with food, water, shelter, and loans to rebuild your smashed homes through a series of disaster relief programs. The kindly paper shufflers at FEMA were on hand to guide you through the labyrinth of federal forms you needed to fill out in order to receive this aid.

Later, the tiny agency grew, and grew, and then grew some more until it was all grown up and became the gargantuan disaster nanny that it is today. But a legacy of their early days still exists; they still set up temporary offices to help residents rebuild there lives.

This is what those 1,000 FEMA employees were being dispatched to do. They had nothing to do with hanging out of helicopters to pluck people from rooftops stranded by the flood. They had nothing to do with driving trucks into the city full of food and water to feed the people who desperately needed it. They had nothing to do with even coordinating any of these activities. All these people were already there, on the ground, in New Orleans working tirelessly to save lives.

For the Associated Press to release an article like this is flabbergasting. It reveals a breathtaking bias in reporting that should be pointed out and condemned by not only bloggers but anyone in the MSM who is concerned about the credibility of their industry. What should have been a one paragraph “filler” in any newspaper has been transformed into definitive “proof” that FEMA and, by extension the Bush Administration, failed to act in a timely manner in relieving the distress of the people of New Orleans.

Due to issues with my hosting company yesterday (and today), and in the aftermath of Katrina, I’ve made the unilateral decision to cancel this week’s Carnival of the Clueless.

To the 35 bloggers who submitted posts, I humbly beg your pardon and hope that you will continue to support the Carnival by submitting posts in the future.

Yesterday, I was unable to access the Admin page on my site for several hours due to slow page loading brought on by some truly monster traffic. I expect something similar today which is why I’ve decided that rather than try and publish tomorrow, we just hold off until next week.

If you’d like to know more about the Carnival, go here.

If you’d like to participate in next week’s Carnival, you can leave a link to your post in the comments or visit Conservative Cat and fill out Ferdy’s handy Carnival Submission Form.

After spending the last 48 hours reading and tabulating information about who, where, when, and what went wrong with Katrina relief, I’d like to proclaim myself an expert. That’s right. You see, these days, anyone can be an expert on anything. It doesn’t take much at all, just the cohones to come out and brag about how knowledgeable you are on any given subject.

That said, I know exactly what went wrong with relief efforts in New Orleans. And surprisingly, it had very little to do with submerged busses, broken promises, missing National Guard troops, and most especially the race, economic status, or political preferencs of the victims.

It was a disaster.

There, I’ve said it. When all is said and done. When all the fingers have pointed and tongues wagged. After the dead are buried, the hearings held, the pundits pontifiate and bloggers blog, it all boils down to this; a force of nature that no one could stop raised a mighty fist a slammed it down on a city and people that didn’t deserve it. It’s a tragedy. It’s an act of God so blame him. “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minues to hours?” is a line from Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. For both believers and non-believers alike, blaming God is not an option.

So why blame anyone?

The politics of the present demand that blame be assessed not so that things can “improve” the next time Mother Nature decides to sit on several million people and destroy lives and livelihoods but so that points can be scored for or against your foe. Like some macabre and ghoulish game of tag, the right and left in the new and old media - myself included - have been slapping each other back and forth in as unedifying a manner as can be imagined. We have not covered ourselves in glory over this tragic episode in our nation’s life. The world is watching wide eyed (and not without a little fear I’d wager) at the spectacle we’re making of ourselves. The scenes of devastation are bad enough. But the glimpse into the pit of hell given to us by the humans who turned into animals stalking their prey like the super-predators we once were has reminded us all that we are still a relatively new species, anthropologically speaking and the thin veneer of civilization we wear can be ripped to shreds by the exigencies of circumstance.

But even the descent of New Orleans into madness was not a deliberate act but rather the consequence of our choice as humans to gather ourselves into communities and, despite every natural impulse screaming at us to do otherwise, try and live together without attacking and felling every stranger that crosses our path. I know there are many who reject this Darwinian view of our species on either anthropologic or religious grounds. But when otherwise civilized human beings - people who just a short while ago you could have walked past on the streets of New Orleans and not been worried about being shot or raped - are turned into gun-toting maniacs, looting and pillaging in a frenzy of blood and lust for booty, that behavior cannot be laid at the feet of a Mayor who might have frozen up or a Governor who may be incompetent, or a FEMA director who could be clueless, or a President who perhaps doesn’t care.

The blame, dearest readers, lies in what Mother Nature did, not in what humans are capable of doing.

This is what a major disaster does. Katrina’s winds didn’t just turn once sturdy dwellings into a jumble of wood and masonry. They also blew away the rickety structures of government that modern humans have come to depend on so heavily to protect us from our own base natures. Would it have been possible to avoid this catastrophic loss of dependency?

I’m sure whatever commission or Congressional committee that investigates the response to the disaster will assign blame to someone or something. That will be the purpose of such a body. But as we’ve recently seen with the 9/11 Commission, politics will be unavoidable. Even in relatively peaceful times where comity reigns and the rush to play “gotchya” games with the nation’s disaster preparedness would be resisted with a little more vigor, the intrusion of partisanship could be minimized but never eliminated. It is the nature of democratic government. Deal with it.

What we should be worrying about is something that any sophmore in high school who has taken “Introduction to Geology” could tell you about; that the earth has seen much, much worse. Back in 1811, the biggest earthquake to ever hit the north American continent struck along the New Madrid fault causing the Mississippi River to actually change course and run backward. And, as physicist Louis Alvarez observed when looking for the meteor strike that may have wiped out the dinasours 60 million years ago, “Have you ever noticed how round the Gulf of Mexico is?”

The list of disaster unthinkables is a long one. A volcanic island in the Canary chain could have half its surface slide into the ocean causing a mile high tsunami that would wash over the eastern seaboard of the US as far inland as the Appalachins. A mountain sized meteor could smash into the Pacific Ocean causing waves to lap at the foothills of the Rocky mountains. A super volcano could erupt in Yellowstone covering half the US with a layer of ash and blocking the sun for months. A large chunck of the Antarctic glacier could slide into the ocean and cause hemispheric catastrophe.

How about something more bizarre? How about a nearby star exploding into a spectacular supernova that would light up our night sky as bright as day…at least until the force of the explosion arrived a short time later to rip the atmosphere away from the planet anhililating all life. Or suppose our stable, reliable sun were to suddenly experience a hiccup and burp a massive solar flare toward earth that would vaporize us in about an hour and a half?

Our puny little efforts to shield ourselves from nature’s fury by “planning” for such calamaties either shows us to be drunk with hubris or insanely optimistic. Therefore, don’t the questions we will be asking our leaders in the inevitable hearings to follow strike you as just a little unrealistic? Where were the busses Mr. Mayor? What about the Guard Madam Governor? What could you have been thinking, Mr. FEMA Director? Do you feel our pain, Mr. President?

These may be good questions but they’re beside the point. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, will we really learn anything that will help us avoid a calamity like this again? Every single disaster we hear “We’ll do better next time.” And every single time that “next time” comes, we fail miserably and utterly to protect people from the catastrophe. It still takes time for rescuers to reach trapped people. They are sometimes too late to do anything. People go hungry. People are thirsty. People still lose everything.

May I suggest a new way to approach these disasters? Instead of waiting to pounce on the next President for not reacting the way that you think she or he should react, perhaps we should bend every effort toward simply acknowledging there are some things beyond our control and going from there. Sure, preposition as many supplies and equipment as you think best, for all the good it does. Even with a minor hurricane, thousands of people will still go hungry, still go thirsty, still lose their homes, and people will still die.

The politics of disaster have changed. If you on the left want to play this game, I daresay you will be as livid as we on the right are when there’s a Democratic President faced with something even half as devastating as Katrina and you find every move questioned, every scrap of food delayed a cause for screaming, and every death an occasion for crocodile tears.

They’re suffering in New Orleans. And both the leaders and the led could benefit by using a little perspective. The enemy is Mother Nature. And as everyone knows, you can’t fight Mother, you simply get out of her way.

Watching New York Times columnist Paul Krugman plumb the depths of depraved Bush bashing is getting close to becoming something of a guilty pleasure; sort of like viewing pornography but without the edifying inclusion of the undraped model’s vital statistics to offset the charge of prurient behavior. After all if, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said of it, pornography is something I recognize when I see it, then certainly the former Enron consultant Krugman’s scribblings will be immediately identifiable as the product of a smutty and lascivious mind, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Marquis de Sade was writing his paeans to the grotesque and unnatural.

Krugman is the best fulminator in the business. No other columnist seethes with as much irrational spite. No other liberal commentator can work himself into such hysterical paroxysms of revulsion over his ideological opponents. He has accused conservatives of wanting to kill liberals. He has just recently been taken to task for blatantly lying about the results of the 2000 Presidential recount by a consortium of media outlets, saying falsely that the study - in which his own paper participated - showed Al Gore winning the election.

And now, Krugman has written a column so chock full of omissions, falsehoods, and outright lies that I’m going to break my promise made just three days ago not to play “the blame game” and give some well deserved rhetorical slaps to The Fulminater’s gigantic ego and minuscule wit.

The title alone should warn the reader off. “Killed by Contempt” is an interesting concept but one that belongs in the realm of exaggeration rather than serious thought. This is par for the course for surely, Mr. Krugman wasn’t being serious when he wrote this:

Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I’m not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.

Never mobilized? A partial listing of federal resources not only mobilized but in place less than 24 hours after the hurricane hit make Krugman out to be either a sloppy, ignorant journalist with no business writing for a major newspaper (even if it is th New York Times) or a prevaricator of monstrous proportions.

Federal assistance in place by Tuesday afternoon:

FEMA deployed 23 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, seven search and rescue task forces, and several hundred tons of supplies for stricken residents.

Department of Transportation had 390 trucks full of millions of MRE’s, millions of gallons of water, millions of pounds of ice, as well as millions of pounds of other disaster supplies.

The Coast Guard had 30 ships and 40 aircraft carrying out operations the minute that Katrina’s fury had passed.

There were 4,000 National Guardsmen assembled and deployed in Louisiana alone.

This doesn’t include assistance mobilized from other agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense and government coordination with the American Red Cross. And most of those listed assets were in place before Katrina even hit.

Then, just to prove he likes to kill his readers with contempt for their intelligence, Krugman contradicts himself:

Here’s one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a “strange paralysis” set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.

I can’t be the only one who sees the total disconnect between his charge of the feds not mobilizing resources and his depiction of a fully staffed hospital ship off the coast on the day of the storm. The fact that it stood empty was the result of necessity. A trip to the ship by helicopter would take nearly 1/2 an hour from the Superdome. A trip to the airport (where medical cases were brought) took 10 minutes. Perhaps we should ask Mr. Krugman if it was his life at stake where minutes counted, would he like to take a nice, relaxing half hour trip to a hospital ship or have the helo make a mad dash for the airport where medical assistance available. And relying on Newsweek for a characterization of an attitude regarding how the Bush Administration reacted (”strange” paralysis? Is there any other kind?) is just plain batty.

Here’s where Krugman deserves to be cast into the outer darkness:

What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn’t deliver.

It would be interesting indeed to know what Dr. Krugman’s prescription for America would have been following 9/11. Alas, given the shallowness of his critique of what the President did in the days and weeks following the attack, we’ll never know. Krugman’s diagnoses since that awful day have usually been so far off the mark that if he was a doctor he would have been jailed for negligence and run out of the medical profession for incompetence.

But the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?

Actually, the government response to the disaster somewhat proves conservative’s point about bureaucratic incapacity. But Krugman’s laughable summation of conservative attitude toward government reveals an unseriousness of thought when it comes to the conservative ideal of federalism. It’s not government conservatives hate. It’s government held hostage by do gooding lickspittles like Krugman who wish to use it’s power as a club to affect behavior and foist a stultifying sameness on the rest of us. It’s bad government conservatives hate. It’s incompetent government conservatives criticize. And for Krugman to say that conservatives hate all government is worse than simplistic; it’s moronic.

Mr. Krugman then turns his less than insightful gaze on one of the most useless Federal agencies around; the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Several recent news analyses on FEMA’s sorry state have attributed the agency’s decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security, whose prime concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in focus misses a crucial part of the story.

For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA’s preparedness programs.

You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.

But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh’s successor.

There is not one shred of evidence that the establishment of FEMA in 1979 has led to the saving of a single additional human life. Prior to the creation of this monster in 1979, each state was responsible for disaster response, a job they were well suited for given their proximity to the tragedy. If the state emergency managers needed help, they called on the Federal government to supply it. The thing is, they didn’t always call on the feds for help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. And for really big cataclysms like devastating earthquakes or hurricanes, the governors and local officials on the scene knew best what they needed and either placed a call to Washington where the resources were then dispatched, or for longer term help, got their Washington representatives to pump the federal spigot for funds.

FEMA was originally seen as a paper shuffling agency. FEMA reps would show up after a disaster with federal forms for the stunned and reeling survivors to fill out in triplicate and a check would then be forthcoming; a redundant but relatively harmless activity for which they were perfectly suited.

What happened in the intervening years has been a textbook case of bureaucratic turf building. From a budget of $250 million in 1979 to its current bloat of nearly $6 billion, FEMA has taken upon itself the role of disaster nanny, horning in on local and state control of disaster resources until disaster management itself has now been pretty much placed in their hands. By duplicating many of the resources that states utilize in the management of natural calamities, FEMA sows confusion and the kind of turf wars mentioned by Governor Blanco.

FEMA has since been moved into the Department of Homeland Security where the President hoped to scale back its disaster management efforts in favor of local DHS officials who would be better positioned to get what they need from Washington. Since one of the first rules of bureaucracy is all good deeds - such as trying to reduce a layer of unnecessary government control - are punished severely, it appears to me anyway that some of the problems associated with this disaster can be attributed to a system in transition.

All that said, even if Mr. Krugman’s criticism of management were valid, he inadvertently makes the point that local and state officials usually know what they need and should be trusted with asking for it without having to fight the Michael Browns of this world who today probably wishes he was back running horse shows.

Finally, Krugman reveals a childlike faith in government that is so misplaced as to put his entire critique in the realm of fantasy:

That contempt, as I’ve said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.

The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren’t caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?

Of course! Government as a force for “good.” Jeez…I thought that went out with the 1960’s. Government, of course, is neither good nor evil. It just is. It’s as close as you can get to being a man made force of nature.

And the “lesson” we might learn from this tragedy isn’t that we need effective government but rather effective local government. While Krugman dreams the dream of all good government liberals, the truly insidious nature of government is revealed. Just because good people want good things doesn’t mean that government will deliver them. The law of unintended consequences - as we’ve seen over the 25 year history of FEMA - knows no morality other than it’s own, relentless logic when it comes to bureaucracy.