Right Wing Nut House

The votes have been counted from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category was yours truly for my Katrina Response Timeline. Finishing second was “Learning from history: the relief and rebuilding of New Orleans” by The Glittering Eye.

The winner in the non-Council category was Varifrank for “10 Things I learned From Hurricane Katrina.” Cold Fury’s “Tom Ridge’s Duct Tape” finished second.

If you’d like to participate in the Watchers Vote, go here and follow instructions.

I took a little test this morning to measure my “outrage quotient.” I’m sure you’re familiar with this test. Although it doesn’t require medical supervision, I recommend that at the very least, you have a friend or family member present just in case something goes wrong. After all, trying to gauge how angry you can get at the mainstream press or the left can be a dangerous proposition. There’s always the chance that you’ll come across something so spiteful, so biased, so…so…outrageous that a myocardial infarction becomes a distinct possibility.

Sue was dead set against me taking the test. “What happens if you read something from Daily Kos and your head explodes?” she asked plaintively.”Or watch Anderson Cooper emote like a cheesy actor in a bad production of Hamlet and throw up? I just did the floor, ya know.”

You can see it took a little convincing.

After promising to accompany her to Pier 1 Imports to pick up a wicker chair to replace the one that our loving cats eagerly shredded by peeling, ripping, biting, and chewing the offending furnishing to smithereens, she agreed to closely monitor my vital signs in the interest of safety.

We started with something easy; the indictment for homicide of the husband and wife owners of a nursing home where 34 elderly patients drowned during the hurricane. Evidently, the owners failed to accept an offer to evacuate the residents prior to the hurricane’s arrival.

My reaction surprised me. Didn’t the Mayor of New Orleans do exactly the same thing when Amtrak offered to evacuate several hundred people the day before the hurricane by train? According to the Washington Post, Amtrak ran a “dead head” train to move equipment out of the city. The company says they offered to move several hundred people but city officials turned them down.

I waited anxiously for the bile to rise in my throat in disgust and my blood pressure to careen out of control, but nothing happened. I glanced at Sue who looked relieved. I could have explained to her that the Mayor of New Orleans has become an untouchable. Any responsibility for the catastrophe rolls off his back like the water that inundated the hundreds of buses left in a municipal parking lot to become submerged instead of being used to evacuate citizens.

Since that didn’t elicit much of response, Sue tried to get a rise out of me by showing me a story involving the other half of the disaster duo, the Governor of Louisiana. It seems that Governor Blanco continues to exhibit a bit of peevishness at the federal government, this time because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is taking too long to recover the dead bodies left in the wake of the hurricane. She says that the dead “deserve more respect than they have received.”

For a moment, I thought I detected a slight rumbling in my gut, a sure indication that my outrage was about to burst forth into a white hot series of invective and angry retorts. I wanted to say something like “maybe you should worry about giving more respect to the living, you cretinous lickpsittle! Start thinking about all the citizens of your state you let down so ignominiously in the hurricane’s aftermath! ” Alas, the rumbling was only indicative of a little indigestion from the Dominoes Pizza we had eaten the night before, not of any real outrage at Governor Blanco’s extraordinary mismanagement of the crisis.

I was beginning to get worried. The test was not going at all like I planned. Even Sue had begun to look at me as if something might be wrong. Then she remembered the story about the Louisiana Congressman who used to National Guard to retrieve his personal belongings while they were still carrying out search and rescue operations.

It seems that Representative William Jefferson (D-LA) commandeered some National Guard troops on Friday, September 2 to take him back to his house in New Orleans so he could pick up a few odds and ends - three suitcases, a laptop, and a box “the size of a small refrigerator.” This is the same Rep. Jefferson who last month had his home searched by the FBI in connection with a corruption probe.

Kind of makes you wonder what was in the box, no?

Sue looked downright crestfallen. No response worth mentioning. My heart never skipped a beat nor was my respiration affected at all. Again, I could have clued her in that having lived and worked in Washington D.C., you develop an outrage proof attitude when it comes to members of Congress. The venality and amorality is so widespread and endemic to the institution that it becomes depressingly the norm to read about such things.

So far, nothing had been able to raise my hackles. It really looked like, with a nod to Jo Dee Messina, “My Give a Damn” was really busted. Then I saw the fearful look on Sue’s face.

“I don’t think you should see this,” she said carefully. “It’s from a diarist at Daily Kos and it’s in response to the President’s statement that he takes responsibility for the federal foul-ups during disaster relief.”

I laughed and Sue nearly swooned. “You don’t get it,” she said angrily. Do you have any idea what this moonbat said?”

“Let me guess,” I chuckled. “Now that Bush has taken responsibility for mistakes made by the Federal government, he should be impeached. Am I right?”

“How did you guess?”

“Honey,” I said patiently, “Nothing those idiots at Kos say either surprises me or causes me much anger any more.”

Sue looked desperate. She thrust a printed copy of the offending passage in front of my nose:

Now that Bush has taken responsibility, he must resign. He has pleaded guilty. He has admitted that he was complicit in the deaths of thousands of people.

Haul his ass in front of the House of Representatives for an impeachment trial, and then ask him to confirm that he admits responsibility. If he denies this, he will look like a flip-flopping liar; if he confirms that it was his fault, Congress will be forced to impeach him.

I actually giggled after reading that. Somehow, the avalanche of lies, distortions, bias, and prejudice had numbed me. I felt like a wet noodle. I got the feeling that nothing the left did from here on out could possibly affect me one way or another. In short, I was suffering from “Outrage Fatigue.”

Then again, maybe it was that Dominoes Pizza we ate last night and by tomorrow I’ll be back to my old apoplectic self.

I will be a guest on the Charles Booker Show on KAHL in San Antonio, 1310 AM to talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

If any of my readers live in San Antonio and have the ability to tape my segment, which begins at around 5:30 PM, I’d appreciate it.

The Carnival is back!

GLENN REYNOLDS SAYS “DON’T MISS IT!”

Simonides: Judah Ben Hur! You’ve come back to us like a returning faith! I want to laugh again, Judah.
Judah Ben-Hur: We will laugh.
Simonides: Laugh, amidst the dust and cobwebs… [sobs]
(Ben Hur: 1959)

It may surprise you to learn that the #1 best selling work of fiction in the history of the United States - at least as far as a percentage of contemporary population - is not a book by Stephen King or any other contemporary author. It is, in fact, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by a mediocre Civil War general and failed politician by the name of Lew Wallace. It has had hundreds of reprintings and has been translated into more than 70 languages. By the late 1890’s, perhaps something on the order of 25% of the literate population of the US had read the book, numbers if translated today would dwarf any other work of fiction by tens of millions.

The story is one of renewal and redemption. These are themes we should certainly be thinking about over the next months as we observe the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast following the most destructive and expensive national disaster in American history.

The faith found by Judah to replace the hate and anger in his heart - a faith that was kindled when he heard Jesus on the cross forgive his executioners and he “felt his words take the sword from my hand” - could hold some lessons for us in these trying days. Perhaps the politicization of the relief efforts surrounding the aftermath of the hurricane was inevitable. Frustration on the left at Bush’s presidency exploded into recrimination almost before hurricane force winds moved inland from the stricken areas on the coast. And the predictable push back by those of us on the right who were at first taken aback by the ferocity of the attacks and then frustrated ourselves at some of the coverage in the MSM has not been a very edifying display for the rest of the world to see.

This is politics in America at the turn of the 21st century. Troubling to some, tiring to many more, I am clueless as to how to fix it or who can fix it or even if it needs fixing. There have been many periods in American history where this kind of partisanship has been the norm. We’ve survived it and gone on to thrive as a nation and a people. I suspect the same will happen here.

That said, sit right down in your easy chair and let your face assume that Carnival stare! Perhaps laughing at ourselves is the best medicine after all.

The American people are very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
(Will Rogers)

Right again, Will! Just ask Michael Brown.
(Me)
*********************************************************************

Mark Coffey is asking why Eleanor Clift isn’t writing for the New York Times since her clueless screeds fit right in with the MoDo-Krugman-Rich Bush bashers.

Smart and sexy, Mensa Barbie has a jaw dropping story about an Alaskan man who doesn’t have a clue how lucky he is. And to prove how clueless this walrus brain really is, he sues his saviors.

Matt Johnston wonders if the clueless left has their own version of the Constitution of the United States. I’ve often wondered that myself…

Fred Fry has our first entry in the “Sean Penn for Cluebat of the Year” contest. What possessed this guy - besides a healthy dose of hubris - to go into a hurricane ravaged city in the first place?

Jebediah, subbing for Bill Teach on White Trash Wednesday, wonders what planet the dynamic disaster duo of Blanc-o-Nagin comes from.

Kim, subbing for Raven over at And Rightly So wonders if Bill Clinton is actually a First Lady (man?) in waiting. Kim refuses to call the ex-despoiler a man - a designation that may in fact become moot if Hillary becomes President.

The Maryhunter tracks down some past cluelessness of the New York Times on flood control advocacy. When is the Times going to learn there’s an internet out there?

Cao of Cao’s Blog (pronounced “key”) uncovers some interesting associations between Cindy Sheehan (whose Magicial Mystery Bus tour came within a stone’s throw of where I sit this week) and Neo-Nazis. Birds of a feather…

Our friends at The Common Room offer two clueless creeps this week as the Headmistress wonders why Mayor Nagin turned down the use of an Amtrak train that could have evacuated hundreds while Equushick has an interesting question about Sean Penn.

Beth is on a rant again. This time it’s against rich hotel guests in New Orleans whose story reveals a “Trail of Idiocy.”

Josh Cohen has moved to some new digs but still has time to clue us in on some cluelessness in the radio industry. Josh wondered how long it would take advertisers to start cashing in on Katrina…Question answered.

Giacomo has found some (gasp!) cluelessness at the Huffington Post! This time it’s Nathan Gardells who comes in for a well deserved spanking.

Van Helsing buries a woodens stake in the heart of Richard Cohen who seems to have found something wrong with John Roberts. In the immortal words of Gomer Pyle “Well Suh-prahz, suh-prahz!”

The folks at Different River skewer al-Reuters for a bizarre article about hurricane victims in Utah. What part of “Christian charity” don’t the knuckleheads at Reuters understand?

The SoCal Pundit has some choice words for the UN and their so-called reform package. Did you know Kofi “I am not a crook” Annan was going to write them himself?

Orac has an incredible expose of one of the major urban legends that have grown up around the hurricane aftermath. To bogus stories like the 2 year old with the throat cut and canniblism can be added the euthanizing of patients by doctors before evacuating. Excellent and original work!

Here’s a trio of satires that will leave you rolling on the floor. First up is Mr. Satire himself whose site is not safe for work. How does “Black Cannibalism Resurfaces While Katrina Subsides” sound ?

Then there’s the incomparable Mr. Right and his homage to one of my favorite bands. The hurricane and “Bohemian Rhapsody?” Don’t worry, it works!

Finally, The Nose on your Face has “Bush’s Hurricane-Blame Numbers Take A Scary Dip.” The site’s motto says it all: “News so fake you’ll swear it came from the mainstream media.”

The Enticy Institute has the politics of brain function…or is it the brain function of politics?

Don Surber has a strange one from the Nebraska State Fair where officials wanted to shut down an “Oxygen Bar.” Oxygen as a prescription drug? Yikes!

Jay at Stop the ACLU has an Open Letter to ACLU Members. We hope it does some good, but we’re doubtin’ it.

Lovely Pamela at Atlas Shrugs has a dainty, ladylike question for the cluebats who accepted a design for the Flight #93 memorial that included a “Crescent of Embrace” in their design: “Are we f**king crazy or am I in a lunatic asylum and just don’t know it?” Um…good point.

Willisms wonders about the disparity between rank and file voters of the two parties and their attitudes toward the state of Israel. Who’s clueless here? Perhaps Jewish voters should take a second look at Republicans.

Poca-Dot Blog has a quiz. Every time I see this thing I wonder how we can have cluelessness like that exhibited by George Galloway.

Harvey at Bad Example proves absolutely conclusively and beyond the shadow of a doubt that Katrina was in fact George Bush’s fault.

Northstar at People’s Republic of Seabrook asks some very penetrating and relavant questions about FEMA’s role in the disaster.

A North American Patriot asks the question of the week; where were all the 9/11 tributes from the left? Not the first blogger to notice the left’s forgetfullness but with a little more pointed query: “Heads in the sand…Or heads up their asses?”

The smartest pachyderms on the planet - Elephants in Academia - has some real cluelessness on the part of the Washington Post in their coverage of The Freedom Walk on Sunday.

Jimmie K wonders “Where did all the Democrats Go?” at a “coming together” event in Maryland. It being September 11, they were probably sleeping - just like America for the 8 years prior to the attacks.

AJ at Strata-Sphere has been on top of the “Crescent controversy” regarding the Flight #93 memorial and has some choice words for dummies who accepted the design saying it was “the most ignorant and unfeeling act of ‘art’ ever produced in this country. Amen.

Mean Ole Meany is really, really mean and nasty to Cluebat Hall of Famer Michael Moore for writing a letter to people who voted for Bush. Talking about Michael Brown’s qualifications and Moore’s girth is spot on I’d say.

Gentle Miriam laments the passing of Labor Day as a meaninful holiday and wonders it isn’t time to change.

The Skwib has a piece on one of the most exciting scientific hunts in history. Will we be able to find the source of “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (FSMS), also known as Pastafarianism?” I hope they find it before I give in to this irresistable craving to go out to dinner at an Italian restaurant…

Finally, here’s my own piece on the exhiliration exhibited by the left as Bush’s numbers fell in the aftermath of the disaster. “Dancing on the Graves of Black People.”

Calling all bloggers!

You have until Monday night at 10:00 PM to get your entries in for this week’s Carnival of the Clueless.

Last week was the best yet with 35 entries from both the right and left side of the political spectrum hammering those individuals and groups among us who are truly clueless.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Each week, I’ll be calling for posts that highlight the total stupidity of a public figure or organization – either left or right – that demonstrates that special kind of cluelessness that only someone’s mother could defend…and maybe not even their mothers!

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the latest from Bill Maher or the Reverend Dobson, it doesn’t matter. I will post ALL ENTRIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED OR NOT..

You can enter by emailing me, leaving a link in the comments section, or by using the handy, easy to use form at Conservative Cat.

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.