Shots Across The Bow

Should the mayor be fired for not ordering evacuations earlier? Maybe. In hindsight, yes he should've. But all the timelines I've looked at still have me believing that nobody had any inkling just what was going to happen, so it was still very ambigious whether there was actually a need.

I guess it goes back to the old mentality that tells me I know nothing about what it's like to be a major of a large American city, so who am I to be Monday Morning Quarterbacking?? If I make a mistake in my job, does the mayor of New Orleans have the right to come and criticize me for something he knows nothing about?

It's ok to have our opinions, but we have to remember that whether its in hurricane evacuation, TennCare reform, or combat and peacekeeping operations in Iraq, most of us have no reason to think we know or have access to all the facts and all the expertise that the people in charge do, and can make accurate assessments of what happens.

Barry, I agree with you completely. None of us know what is required to carry out a city wide evacuation, or even how to evaluate the consequences of an unecessary evacuation, although, based on the resulting chaos, not all caused by flooding, it would have been very ugly.

In fact, I've raised that very point in defense of the seemingly slow buildup to Federal action. The little I do know about logistics tells me it takes time to marshall a force to deal effectively with a disaster of this magnitude. Yet some persist in pointing fingers based on blind ignorance and partisanship.

I'm just fed up with people trying to score political points out of other people's suffering. It turns my stomach.

Oh wait - Nagin didn't have bus drivers available, did he? His bad, I guess, for letting them evacuate voluntarily. And once the highways were one-way outbound (Saturday 8/27), it wasn't exactly like the buses could do shuttle trips.

Here's the deal: any city, any state (except FL, I guess) goes through this sort of thing only once every blue moon. There's a limit to how well you can be prepared for this sort of thing if it's not routine for you.

Which is FEMA's role. Hurricanes are their routine. Their job is to make sure the local people know what to do, and what they can and can't expect FEMA to do for them.

What they told Nagin during the Hurricane Pam exercise was that they'd be there with the sun, the moon, and the stars, 48 hours after the hurricane swept through. Nagin's role was keeping his city alive until then.

OK, he didn't do a perfect job of that. But still, if the cavalry had arrived on Wednesday as promised (hell, FEMA originally promised buses en masse at the Superdome on Tuesday), then everything would have worked OK for all but a handful of people.

Things went to hell in Mississippi too; five or six days after Katrina, there were still people wandering around aimlessly, never having seen local government, FEMA, or Red Cross, looking for food and water just to stay alive. Funny how nobody's criticizing the state or local governments there.

"I'm just fed up with people trying to score political points out of other people's suffering. It turns my stomach."

It's called accountability, dude. The Bush Administration set itself up structurally to fuck up, and it came through, big time. The only way to hold it politically responsible is to make a stink about it while it's fresh in people's minds, not a year later. And it looks to all the world like there is going to be NO independent, bipartisan commission investigating what went wrong. So it's this or nothing.

So it's important to get the news out in real time about what Bush and his incompetent appointees should have been doing, specifically, starting on the Friday before the storm, what they did instead, and what difference it made. That's what's been happening. If you don't like it, democracy just doesn't suit you.