This supports the theory that EVERYTHING is viewed and weighed strictly as a political matter in the WH. [Makes me serious question the War effort, btw.]

Here’s why Rove, et al aren’t racist. If this happens to a black constiuency in FL, e.g., IN AN ELECTION YEAR, there’s a prompt and overwhelming fed response. Rove knows it’s too dicey to play politics then. 05 is an off-year, so it’s less compelling.

You can lose your soul with this kind of thinking.

Holy cow, really?

I don’t mean to bash, because I agree with you, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard a Republican even begin to concede that Bush has responsibility over the actions of his subordinates. Every single failure over the last 5 years has landed far short of the Oval Office. Like in Iraq, he says the generals would tell him if they needed more troops and that’s that. Nobody ever asks him what he thinks, because he does technically outrank the generals.

What, I ask you, do we pay this guy for? In Iraq he proudly admits that he does nothing more – and sometimes even less – than rubberstamp the decions made by those below him. On Wednesday he informed us of what we already knew federal agencies were doing, and oh yeah, send cash. He didn’t announce a place for people to volunteer their homes and bodies, he didn’t call for every seaworthy craft in range of New Orleans to report to the south end of the lake or the mouth of the river. He barely even tried to deviate from the bullet points that someone had handed him 20 seconds before he reached the podium; my god, his attempts at being extemporaneous were like a sixth-grader trying to paraphrase an encyclopedia article.

If we can’t do better than this at a time like this, I think we need to seriously reconsider our self-proclaimed status as the world’s greatest country.

Let this be a lesson to you– actions have consequences. You did not vote for Bush because you thought he was a good president on Iraq. You voted for him because doing otherwise would have been a tacit admission that you were wrong about Iraq. Unfortunately, the events of the past week have spiraled out of control to the point where you can no longer convince yourself that you were right all along, and you are starting to face up to your failures in judgment and decision-making capacity. Because of this failure in judgment and discernment on your part, because of your inability to interpret failure after failure of the Bush administration as something to concern yourself about, and because of your failure to recognize that “tough talk” does not imply intelligent decisionmaking, the country finds ourself in the mess it is in today.

Many Democrats repeatedly pointed out that Bush appeared to put a larger priority on invading Iraq than on preventing and responding to terrorist attacks. They were right. However, the problem is that some voters simply believed that the sexiness and visceral appeal of fighting and invading another country was much more compelling than the mediocre, workaday process of disaster preparation and prevention.

Go ahead and ban me too, asshole.

Frankly, I do not believe you are a single issue, security, democrat.

I believe you are a stupid greedy pig idiot.

oh, and f you. big time.

TIME TO SIGN UP, MOFO.

There’s hundreds of bodies floating in the sewage filled waters of Lake George and their blood is on your pathetic craven hands.

Scum.

I agree completely. Unfortunately, what you get in a crisis is what you have prepared in advance. People have been thinking in a peacetime way and it is biting us now.. That is what I meant wen I agreed with Jim Jones about the usefulness of some kind of deep soul searchiing, blame game, whatever you want to call it. We need things a little more directive when it comes to evacuations in the future – power to round people up, power to commandeer private vehicles, numbers of personnel in place early enough to make it all happen, in this case, police personnel, since it takes hours at least for the NG to show up with long arms and real coercive power.

We need a frank review of the effectiveness of the various state governments. They have handled this with varying degrees of effectiveness. Louisiana was predictably Third World. In the past that was not a matter for anyone else to meddle in. That was then and this is now.

I also agree there have been failures at the federal level. Stopping the looting was obviously not one of them – it is flat illegal for federal troops to engage in police activity and that stupid law has so far withstood every challenge, and National Guard are state assets – but there are other failures. The flood control defunding comes instantly to mind. I live on the West Coast, and we really don’t have any illusions about the level of comprehension of our risk that we can expect from bureaucrats 3,000 miles away. We have noted how much more of a “disaster” floods in the Midwest are than are earthquakes on the West Coast. that is a structrural problem, not so much of organizational structure but of the demographics of the people in decision-making positions. If more of those came from the South and the West Coast, rather than the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, we might see a change in emphasis, maybe that federal law as to job requirements might address. That is for a political discussion.

This Administration has been allowed too many failures of due diligence. Too many people have died because of these mistakes. It is not true that “nobody was walking around last week” talking about what could happen-there were people doing exactly that, and they have been doing it for years.

I want to know why the flood-control project was defunded. Precisely because I know there were all kinds of warnings that something like this not only could happen, but was bound to happen, if we did not address the levees.

But to the author’s point: The envisioned troika: FEMA State Govenment Local authority, as a way of handling a large crisis, appears to be failing some people here in a significant way. The NO mayor did complain about too many chefs… And yes, the FEMA part is Bush’s responsibility, but the other two are not.

So yes, I agree that the credibility of the assurance that a major planned cataclysm can be dealt with succesfully is at stake.

On the other hand, even if indeed the deaths in NO number into the thousands that still means a >99% survival rate. Not to diminish those who died, just trying to get a perspective here on what to expect.

I for one don’t have a solution to guarantee a better survival rate. Really, I don’t. Not trying to be cold hearted here, just being very practical.

So here is the challenge: can anyone come up with a better way of dealing with great calamities, whether planned as an attack or a natural disaster? Remember, the scale here is very large, not just one community.

Yes, I bet that in this particular instance, upon later review, a few things *might* jump out as simple methods that would have minimized the deaths in NO in particular. But if they are too particular to NO and hurricanes they might not apply to a different situation very well.

Dan