The Bush administration has embraced a term that truly sets my teeth on edge: The Blame Game.
Yet again, the administration trivializes that which it wants to draw attention from or diminish, finding new and innovative ways to dodge questions and avoid responsibility.
I have no clear idea yet, for certain, if lapses in administrative judgment can be blamed for everything from siphoning money away from shoring up the levies in order to support the war and Bush’s tax cuts, to slow response to the emergency. But these are questions that must be asked. Clearly, the Bush administration embraces this notion with the same enthusiasm and thirst for truth that it did the 9/11 panel. Instead it endeavors to sprint along the obvious “high road”: The Bush administration will not play “the blame game” when people need to be helped.
You know what? The government is large enough to multitask. There’s no reason it can’t help people AND investigate. Not play “the blame game.” It’s not a game, Mr. Bush. Perhaps much of your life has been thus far. Play with toys such as corporations, governments and armies, run them into the ground, and then wait for others to clean up your mess. But it’s not. A game. It never has been, and that’s something that this administration has yet to comprehend.
One thing guaranteed, though: They’ll try to find a way to blame it on Clinton. But Clinton shouldn’t take it personally. It’s all part of the game.
UPDATED 10:45 AM. Maggie Thompson sent me the following link: http://www.thisisnotover.com/archives/2005/09/heres_what_gets.html This is one of those “I wish I’d said that” entries.
PAD
• 
In case any of you read too much into my example, I am saying that the poor marketing by DC, etc., proably did play a role in poor sales for Fallen Angel. PAD could write the best comic book ever, but it takes the support and work of the publisher to help it succeed.
Iowa Jim
Jim, the only difference I’d make to your analogy is that to make it fit on any levelwith the disaster situation and response, you’d need to put PAD in Brown’s position and DC Editorial (or president even) into Bush’s.
Fred
James and Knuckles — thanks for the kind words. It just kinda spilled out.
TWL
Also, it depends on what kind of consequences there are. For Nagin and Blanco…they should be out of office. The folks at the local disaster management agencies should be fired if they did nothing [obviously, if they knew and tried to get things changed, they shouldn’t get the entire brunt of criticism]. The FEMA folks who didn’t give a high priority toward revising plans should be disciplined, as should the folks who didn’t think that red tape should be relaxed in the wake of an emergency.
Bush bears ultimate responsibility for his strategy that emphasized terrorism response over disaster mitigation and recovery; he also bears responsibility for not getting FEMA and Homeland Security up to speed to serve the needs of disaster victims–no matter if the larger responsibility lies with the state and local authorities, it’s still the federal government’s job to make sure they are adequate. The consequences for him are to go back to the drawing board, rethink his strategy and get something that works.
Jim, the only difference I’d make to your analogy is that to make it fit on any levelwith the disaster situation and response, you’d need to put PAD in Brown’s position and DC Editorial (or president even) into Bush’s.
PAD also isn’t incompetent, unlike some of Bush’s appointees.
Oh, look. More stuff debunking the myth that Gov. Blanco didn’t do squat before the storm hit and that Bush was the big mover and shaker here.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050903/ap_on_re_us/katrina_national_guard
Just a short bit from the piece:
“Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help from his state’s National Guard last Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come from Washington until late Thursday.”
The Report on Blanco
Hope my HTML is right. I hate these anchor tags.
The long and the short of the above document is this: Blanco actually did her job, if you assume that the Congressional Research Service actually knows how to do theirs.
Thanks for the quote from Bush, Iowa Jim. While it did have a couple more equivocations in it than I would like to hear from the President of the United States, it’s still the most responsibility I can remember ever hearing the Administration take for ANY mistake. And if the mayor hasn’t stepped up to accept his responsibility yet – especially in light of failures like not accepting the Amtrak offer to use their supply train to evacuate people which Bill alerted us to above – that is disgraceful.
(I did briefly get one favorable impression of him when I heard that he wrote a letter to the New Orleans Saints which was so emotional that head coach Jim Hasslett was unable to finish reading it to the team, and the assistant who followed also had difficulty. Of course, much of that emotion could be from what the Saints themselves have experienced, thinking about their families and all of the people they’ve met who’ve been affected by Katrina. The NFL coverage over the weekend showed that they’ve been doing what they can to help – including winning the game, which the displaced Louisianians in Houston made clear was important to them. After the game, Joe Horn – the Saints wide receiver maybe best known to some [including me, to some extent] as “the bozo who hid his cell phone in a goalpost for a touchdown celebration” – but who was among the many Saints who brought supplies and gifts to the Astrodome this past week – said that if stealing a flat screen TV from his house could help feed your family, take it; take everything.)
Anyway, to get back to the mayor, I really dobut that he’ll ever be re-elected. I wonder, would there be any provisions to remove him from office before the decisions of rebuilding have to be made? (For that matter, could there be a case for criminal negligence, in the cases of the train and the buses, for example?)
Well, if the bad publicity, public pressure, and “blaming” can actually get the Bush Administration to admit to a possible error, maybe it’s this “blaming” isn’t all a bad thing 😉
And Bill, it occurred to me, too, when I was writing that previous post (expressing respect for your posting of evidence of Bush cronyism) that the common meeting ground of “A lot of our people suck, too” isn’t really the ideal one 🙁 But maybe, if the people who make up both sides can start looking critically at their own officials, as well, maybe we can weed out enough of the rotten ones that someday we can get a majority of representatives whom we can actually be proud of? (Okay, it’s pretty sad that it’s hard to keep a straight face while typing that.) Maybe? Someday?
I am sure it still won’t be enough for a few of you, but I am not sure if his even resigning would be enough! 😉
Well, hari-kari would be the honorable thing … 😀
Jerry C. – Ugh. If Gov. Blanco accepted an offer of aid the day before – but couldn’t receive it for FIVE DAYS because of slow-to-arrive paperwork from Washington – that is a disgusting failure of the system, and one for which the state level would certainly appear to be blameless. (In fact, can states-righters be happy if the states do in fact need federal permission to send emergency aid to each other?)
I also heard reports that the main problem was communications.
Much of this certainly falls on the city and state. There was no redundancy in the city communications system, and when that failed, there was no manual backup (using non-police personnel as runners, etc.). And apparently, there was supposed be FEMA communications equipment to be used (not sure if it was for local providers or for FEMA efforts), but funding for that was apparently cut.
I’m not sure who was responsible for the reported fact that there was only one satellite radio for the Louisiana and Mississipi National Guard combined (the rest were off in Iraq), state or federal…..
Another “blame the local guys” gets debunked.
Heard the one being put out hard by Fox News and others about how the mayor and Gov. Blanco fell down on getting people out because they let their 2000 (or 3000 depending on who is telling the lie) school buses/buses sit and get flooded out as people who could have been taken from the area in them died? This is really getting pushed hardest by Sean (I couldn’t tell the truth with a gun to my head)Hannity but it is being reported as fact in their news reports as well.
I had a problem with that one from the fact that I had already seen reports about how the mayor had used the public bus system to get people out of the area. Now this pops up.
http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/uploads/2253.pdf
As of 2003 (the most recent year for the data available) New Orleans’ public schools owned a grand total of 324 school buses. That must have been a one hëll of an increase in buses in just 24 months. Plus the data shows that 70 were broken down.
Would the buses of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority added in been a huge increase to the total? No. A Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development profile of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, last updated on May 5, noted that they owned only 364 public buses. This brings the total to 688 buses (minus whatever number may have been on the shelf.)
So, unless I or somebody else finds a link showing that NO had an increase of 1312 buses (or 2312 buses for the extreme liars) in the last 24 months and how many actually worked, we show again that Fox News likes to lie like no other news organ since the fall of the USSR.
>This is really getting pushed hardest by Sean (I couldn’t tell the truth with a gun to my head)Hannity but it is being reported as fact in their news reports as well.
And he’s also continuing to spew the lie of “There was no evacuation” – when LA managed to move *over one million people* out of the path of the storm.
Of course, it’s Faux News, so “All Lies, All the Time” is expected from them…
The long and the short of the above document is this: Blanco actually did her job, if you assume that the Congressional Research Service actually knows how to do theirs.
Well, since a Democrat’s name is on it, it may just get dismissed by wingnuts…
But I’m not sure she should be excused for some of her poor decision making, like the delays in signing necessary orders, some of the dithering that was apparent, and the lack of back up planning.
From what I’m reading in this report, that’s simply not the case. The delays in signing came from DC, not from LA.
I meant other signings, such as the signing for out of state doctors to be allowed to work in the area and the order to allow National Guard forces to commandeer trucks.
Now those are levels of bureaucracy that the DHS was supposed to eliminate when it was implemented. One of the selling points of the whole idea of “Homeland Security” is that it would put every element of homeland protection under one umbrella and cut through the red tape. From what I’m seeing here, it hasn’t done that. If anything, it’s quite the opposite.
Huh. Interesting, if true (and not surprising considering the red-tape addiction of FEMA)(that would come, I would think, with the itnroduction of leadership that wasn’t so versed in disaster recovery nuts-and-bolts).
On other fronts, here’s an interesting post from the guy who was present at the Hurrican Pam simulation:
http://suspect-device.blogspot.com/2005/09/in-wake-of-poseidon-how-it-all.html
And here’s thinkprogresses.org’s spin on the blame game:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/09/13/katrina-myths-debunked/
As always, take this with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that the talking-points gang is going to oversimplify and miss all the subtle interactions that multiplied the incompetency…
Awp. Another interesting post. This time from Jeffrey Itell, the guy who led the GAO’s investivation of FEMA’s work during Hurricane Andrew event:
http://www.theinformationist.com/
The upshot is that the 2nd Bush Administration took every single recomendation of that GAO report and undid them, so that the failures of FEMA could be repeated.
Jerry, however many buses there were (and it tells you something about the place if 20% were broken down) the point is that they should have been used!
Ditto with the trains.
No, it would not have been enough to get 100,000 people out. Maybe “just” another 10-15 thousand. Isn’t that something? (they could also have gotten more buses into the city, since it took a while before Mayor Dimbulb thought to make all the lanes outgoing).
Stuff du jour:
While I love to spot egregious examples of bad reporting in America, you really have to look outside the country to see how bad it can get. From England’s The Sun comes one Jeremy Clarkson who states:
“On the streets you’ve got some poor, starving soul helping themselves to a packet of food from a ruined, deserted supermarket. And as a result, finding themselves being blown to pieces by a helicopter gunship. With the none-too-bright soldiers urged on by their illiterate political masters, the poor and needy never stood a chance. It’s easier and much more fun to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea.
“Especially if they’re black.”
Anybody want to fill me in on what I missed? Gunships blowing people to pieces?
Gov. Blanco should know by now that just because the you aren’t on television doesn’t mean that camera isn’t on: http://thepoliticalteen.net/2005/09/12/blancocnndaybreak/
Add Louis Farrakhan to the list of idiots who see divine intervention in New Orleans’ destruction: “New Orleans is the first of the cities going to tumble down… unless America changes its course. It is the wickedness of the people of America and the government of America that is bringing the wrath of God down.” Gee, and he seemed like such a sweet guy.
Meanwhile, in another part of the world, Palestinians showed why the expression “they will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’ is so apt; give the chance to show how well they can act when given a victory they responded by burning synagogues.
Yes, those hundreds of buses could still have withdrawn thousands of people from harm’s way … which is one of the reasons why grossly exaggerating the numbers of buses available is NOT helpful. The fact that gross incompetence or negligence may have occurred here gets obscured by the lying tactics of Hannity and other pundits. They already have a good point, if they would just make it. Instead, through either dishonest inflation of numbers or, at best, incompetant failure to check the facts in the hurry to bleat out their opinions, they obfuscate the inportant truth of the situation while continuing to add to the reasons to distrust them, and not helping in reducing partisan disturst, either. So, the important fact is that, as far as we know, the mayor of New Orleans totally failed to use available resources including Amtrak and hundreds of buses to rescue people from Katrina’s path; but, as being demonstrated right here and now, exaggerated propoganda is getting in the way of that truth being recognized.
So…..I guess it >IS
So….I guess it is true that Gov. Blanco had to leave a message at the White House when she was asking for more help when the storm hit….
Bill,
It still makes a big difference when people are throwing accusations around. The fact is that Fox News has been telling quite a few lies about this. Hannity has been telling many lies about this.
Maybe the buses could have been used but you still needed drivers to do it. By most accounts, published and broadcast, most of the qualified drivers disappeared when the State of Emergency and the evacuations were called. That left more buses then drivers. Most people, despite your earlier postings regarding your bus driving skills, end up more like Otto of the Simpsons then you the first time they try and drive a bus. And that’s in good conditions. Put a person who has never driven a bus behind the wheel, throw them into an area with tight turns and narrow streets and add in the weather condition brought on by an approaching category 5 hurricane and you have a situation where unskilled, unqualified and inexperienced drivers are likely to be as deadly as they are helpful.
Plus, I hate this lie because it’s an attempt to create a straw dog for Bush backers to battle. If you dig around the Nworleens posts you will find one of mine pointing out to somebody that a comment on the TV that they didn’t like (something about people not wanting to leave) was somewhat true. During the pre-landfall of Katrina evacuation (you know, the one Hannity and crew claim never happened) the Mayor and other officials ordered the public transit system to use their buses to aid in evacuation and later moving people to areas of less risk. The complaint/statement that many of the officials made was that the buses were running half empty even when they should have had full loads. Why? Because many people were too dámņëd stupid or stubborn to leave.
Let us just pretend for a moment that the Fox News lie was the truth. Hëll, why not expand it. NO had 10,000 buses and enough drivers to run them all but let 9,750 sit empty and unused. What good would the extra 9,750 buses be if, by the end of the evacuation and the start of landfall, the 250 running buses were only getting one to ten riders? What, maybe you put 9,750 drivers in the danger zone that you didn’t need to?
The point is that Fox, Hannity, Drudge, Rush, etc. are lying through there teeth and, seemingly, just making stuff up as they go along. I’ll point that out when I see it just like I’ll point out the stupidity of the ignorant a**holes going around claiming that bush knew this would happen this way and let it because he hates black people or the ones throwing out wingnut ideas about how they let it happen to wreck the oil production to net huge profit$. But, yeah, I’m more critical of the lies from people like Hannity and crew because the wingnuts’ stupidity is trying to point out evil by stating opinion about what they think Bush and crew thought or felt while Hannity and crew are lying about times, dates, figures and facts and MAKING UP THE NEWS. The wingnuts are idiots pure and simple. The Hannities are cold, calculated, manipulative liars. The wingnuts I’ll tolerate but won’t deal with that often. The Hannities I simply hate.
Oh, come on. Saying England’s The Sun is like saying The Weekly World News. I’ve two english friends who say that the only reason it sells at all is because it’s cheaper then the kittie litter it’s used as.
What if the house next door to mine is on fire. Do I call the local authorities or someone in Washington DC?
Before Bu$Hitler gets nailed, I think we ought to take someone to task for another natural disaster that killed 525 people in only 5 days here in the United States.
“The heat wave in July 1995 in Chicago was one of the worst weather-related disasters in Illinois history with approximately 525 deaths over a 5-day period. As noted by Changnon et al. (1996), “The loss of human life in hot spells in summer exceeds that caused by all other weather events in the United States combined, including lightning, rainstorms/floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes.””
http://www.sws.uiuc.edu/atmos/statecli/General/1995Chicago.htm
We know the weather days in advance!! We should have had US Military Forces on the streets of Chicago with air conditioners, fans and coolers filled with ice and cool drinks!!
What if the house next door to mine is on fire. Do I call the local authorities or someone in Washington DC?
DId you read the GAO report from 1992?
The point is that Fox, Hannity, Drudge, Rush, etc. are lying through there teeth and, seemingly, just making stuff up as they go along. I’ll point that out when I see it just like I’ll point out the stupidity of the ignorant a**holes going around claiming that bush knew this would happen this way and let it because he hates black people or the ones throwing out wingnut ideas about how they let it happen to wreck the oil production to net huge profit$. But, yeah, I’m more critical of the lies from people like Hannity and crew because the wingnuts’ stupidity is trying to point out evil by stating opinion about what they think Bush and crew thought or felt while Hannity and crew are lying about times, dates, figures and facts and MAKING UP THE NEWS. The wingnuts are idiots pure and simple. The Hannities are cold, calculated, manipulative liars. The wingnuts I’ll tolerate but won’t deal with that often. The Hannities I simply hate.
Fair enough, though I always thought that “wingnut” was reserved for right wingers. “Moonbat” is the term for left wing crazies. Not that this is written in stone anywhere. 🙂
Clearly Hannity is in the wrong here but what did Drudge get wrong?
I’m less tolerant of the moonbats because I think that their attempts to play the race card contribute to racial hatred in our society.
Oh, come on. Saying England’s The Sun is like saying The Weekly World News.
Well, that explains a lot. I thought they were legit. Glad to hear otherwise.
And I’m still saying that it isn’t that dámņ hard to drive a bus. I’m assuming that the buses there are like the ones I drive–automatic drive. If they are stick shift, sure, that would be hard. Otherwise, I just don’t get what the problem is. No tougher than driving a moving van. Easier than maneuvering a U-Haul, in my experience.
I may be way off base here but I’d gladly put my kids on a bus driven by a sober person even without bus experience, if the alternative were to keep them in a city that’s below sea level during a category 4 hurricane. But you are absolutely correct that all of this may be for nothing; if people did not wish to leave it really does not matter how many buses there were. But this is not quite the story we have been hearing, which is that poor people were left to face the fury of the hurricane while the wealthy were able to leave.
(and get shot up by gunships)
One bit of good news–the people who ran that Nursing Home where 30+ people died were arrested.
More good news–it looks like Mayor Nagen pulled those fatality numbers out of his ášš. So far the numbers have remained mush lower. Of course, as always, one horrible discovery could change all that so lets keep hoping.
I can’t take credit for it, and I apologize if it’s been posted before, but I thought this somewhat apropos of this conversation:
How many Bush administration people does it take to change a light bulb?
1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed;
2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed;
3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb;
4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness;
5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb;
6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner ‘Bulb Accomplished’;
7. One administration insider to resign and in detail reveal how Bush was literally ‘in the dark’ the whole time;
8. One to viciously smear No. 7;
9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along;
10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.”
I may be way off base here but I’d gladly put my kids on a bus driven by a sober person even without bus experience, if the alternative were to keep them in a city that’s below sea level during a category 4 hurricane. But you are absolutely correct that all of this may be for nothing; if people did not wish to leave it really does not matter how many buses there were. But this is not quite the story we have been hearing, which is that poor people were left to face the fury of the hurricane while the wealthy were able to leave
Well, there’s the timing in all this. For 24-72 hours before the storm, I doubt that anybody would be taking the bus; it’s in the 12 hours before and maybe during the first parts that people would change their minds and try to get out…
Roger, i think your argument only works if you don’t think there were people who all along wanted to get out but couldn’t for lack of transportation.
a point that was mentioned much earlier was whether they had fuel for the busses. in a disaster situation it’s conceivable that they didn’t have access.
i’ve heard stories of people who had cars but couldn’t get gas to leave town.
sadly, though, it does sound like the busses were underused. or, if the stories of busses being half full are true and the stories of people who wanted to get out are true, they were mismanaged.
Well, as long as we’re discussing jokes, I saw the following:
Q: What is Bush’s opinion of Roe Versus Wade.
A: He doesn’t really care HOW people get out of New Orleans.
PAD
Actually, my point was that a lot of people may have delayed getting on the bus until they saw what they were actually facing. Underutilized at the beginning, then a higher demand as time got closer (to protect their homes, not believing it’d really be that bad, etc.). But it’s not something I’m holding that strongly.
Has there been discussion of this passage from the NY Times:
Hrm. Maybe the deference to the locals looks good in theory, but really didn’t work out in practice….or that the implementation in this case was all wrong headed…..
Long as we’re allowed to joke about it…
http://intherightplace.blogspot.com/2005/09/new-orleans-rhapsody.html
New Orleans Rhapsody
[Sung to the tune of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody]
Time for more left wing
Paranoid fantasy,
Caught in the flood tide,
Out of touch with reality,
They spin their lies,
They just criticize and seethe,
“Hicks from those red states, show them no sympathy!”
“Because they’re filthy scum, we all know!”
“Hit ’em high, hit ’em low!”
They can’t shut their blow-holes,
They’ve got Bush Derangement you see, you see
Dubya’s, the one they blame,
They’re all calling for his head,
“There’s 10,000 people dead!”
Dubya, Schumer’s raising funds,
And Landrieu’s gonna punch you in the nose!
Dubya, ooo
Nagin let the buses drown,
And Blanco barred the Red Cross from New Orleans,
But to Dems, but to Dems, the facts never seem to matter
Look out, the storm has come,
It’s a category five,
Need big-screen TV’s to survive!
Goodbye, everybody – you’ve got to go,
Better leave that loot behind and save your tush!
Dubya, ooo (Hurricane force winds blow)
“Kyoto went unsigned!”
“It’s all his fault the levees weren’t improved!”
[Guitar solo]
“I see a little Chimpbushitler of a man!”
“Dubya Bush! Dubya Bush! Sole cause of global warming!”
“FBI hunts Nagin!” “Cannibals crave Cajun meat!”
Media drones, (Media drones)
Media drones, (Media drones)
Media drones, inundate the Superdome!
“They’re just the black folks, Bush never loved them!”
“They’re just the poor folks, come from poor families –
Bush wants them dead, he’s a monster you see!”
Sean Penn’s got a boat, cannot make it float!
Not Nagin! No – It’s Bush’s fault you know – not Blanco
Not Nagin! It’s Bush’s fault you know – not Blanco
Not Nagin! It’s Bush’s fault you know – not Blanco
Bush’s fault you know – not Blanco (Never, never, never)
Bush’s fault you know – not Blanco-o-o-o-o
No, no, no, no, no, no, no –
“Oh, Where’s FEMA? Where’s FEMA?”
“Where’s FEMA? Where’d they go?”
“George Dubya Bush bombed the levees and let in the sea!”
“The sea!”
“The sea!”
[Begin Wayne’s World head bang…]
So you think you can snow me with all of your lies?
You’re all so full, there’s brown in the whites of your eyes!
You’re crazy – can’t believe you’re this crazy!
Just cut it out – just cut it right out, ya hear!
(Too bad, so sad…)
None of this stuff matters,
Anyone can see,
No time for the blame game – while we’ve still got people in need
Time to shut your blow-holes…
[Gong!]
Adn I thoght my Rolling Brown Out pun was painful to read.
“And” & “thought”
🙁
I’ll wake up in a bit.
“however many buses there were (and it tells you something about the place if 20% were broken down)”
I just find the last part of this comment to be crass. Anyone with school-bus motor pool experience care to let us know, on average, how many busses in the pool are in need to operational maintenance at any one time? If 20% out of service is high, low, normal? Assuming that 20% out of service busses means anything more than just what the facts state is just that…an assumption. And you know what assuming does to people.
And while people are busy castigating the mayor for his total faiure “to use available resources including Amtrak and hundreds of buses to rescue people from Katrina’s path,” remember that over 90% of the people in the area were successfully evacuated…over 1 million people, in 36 hours. Can anyone site to a successful evacuation of this scale, in this timeframe, from this heavily populated an area, from any other point in history? This isn’t like a high-school fire drill, where you need to get a few hundred kids out into the parking lot.
As easy as it is to criticize the Feds’ slow response during this crisis, it’s even easier to ask “why not use all those busses?” As others have pointed out, by the time the evacuation became mandatory, many of the qualified bus drivers had fled the area. And while some may think it’s an easy thing to drive a bus (it’s like a big car, right…well, not really), I doubt very much that it is. There was at least one bus accident during the evacuation after the storm struck, where I believe 5 people died. Now, imagine that a bus overturns during the pre-storm evacuation occurs because of an inexperienced driver…on the main route out of the city. Precious time is lost as that bus needs to be cleared from blocking the lanes, the result being that thousands more people are stuck on a bridge, in their cars, when the storm surge hits. Then we’d have people blaming the mayor for allowing untrained drivers to operate those busses, endangering thousands more in a reckless effort to evacuate 40 more people.
Adding to the joking nature of the morning…..
The Sun: Headlines from 9/14/05.
PETROL PROTESTS FAIL TO BITE
FEARS of blockade of fuel centres eased as few protesters turn up – but long queues petrol stations
MANY KILLED IN IRAQ OUTRAGES
MORE than 100 people have died in four suicide attacks and series of executions in Baghdad
Murder in Harvey Nicks
Gunman kills ex-lover then himself at store
Flintoff in £3m cash bonanza
But Ashes hero says riches will not change him
Kate & Pete’s fashion duet
Couple record track in bid for style success
CAT FIGHTS ON THE CATWALK
Tears & tantrums as babes battle for model crown
ANT & DEC’S BIG CONFESSION
Duo say they’re to blame for Jordan’s Chavfest wedding
Nicola T, 22, from Croydon
See loads more girls on our super cyber site
Your say about Sun Online
Funeral for tot in concrete
Brit Paras ‘beat me up’
In the name of Gord
Dome chief’s £4m rip-off
PS2 power pack recall
Diana’s role for William
Cheque out Sun Money
Send us your photographs
Great news from The Sun
Got a story for The Whip?
That’s the front page. It goes down from there. And that’s not even counting the ads and links for stuff like Super Babes and bizarre Exposed Celeb Snaps. I would have loved to have posted some of the sports stuff but I’m not sure that it’s in anything like English. Maybe it’s Cockney slang but it dámņëd sure aunt English.
Can ANYONE pleasetell me why more heads aren’t rolling over this DISASTER made WORSE by incompetent leadership?!?!?
When Do The Saints Come Marching In?
A Very Different Picture of post-Katrina New Orleans
EDITOR’S NOTE: Redbone Press publisher Lisa Moore has been telling a very different story about the armed denizens of New Orleans.
I heard from my aunt last night that my cousin Denise made it out of New Orleans; she’s at her brother’s in Baton Rouge.
Her mother, a licensed practical nurse, was called in to work on Sunday night at Memorial Hospital (historically known as Baptist Hospital to those of us from N.O.). Denise decided to stay with her mother, her niece and grandniece (who is two years old); she figured they’d be safe at the hospital. They went to Baptist, and had to wait hours to be assigned a room to sleep in. After they were finally assigned a room, two white nurses suddenly arrived after the cut-off time (time to be assigned a room), and Denise and her family were booted out; their room was given up to the new nurses. Denise was furious, and rather than stay at Baptist, decided to walk home (several blocks away) to ride out the storm at her mother’s apartment. Her mother stayed at the hospital.
She described it as the scariest time in her life. Three of the rooms in the apartment (there are only four) caved in. Ceilings caved in, walls caved in. she huddled under a mattress in the hall. She thought she would die from either the storm or a heart attack. After the storm passed, she went back to Baptist to seek shelter (this was Monday). It was also scary at Baptist; the electricity was out, they were running on generators, there was no air conditioning. Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. They moved patients upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. They were told that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. Then they were told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and S. Claiborne, to await the buses. They waded out in hip-deep water, only to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y’all call the median) for three 1/2 hours. The buses came and took them to the Ernest Morial Convention Center. (yes, the convention center you’ve all seen on TV.)
Denise said she thought she was in hëll. They were there for two days, with no water, no food. no shelter. Denise [was with] her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and two-year-old grandniece. When they arrived, there were already thousands of people there. They were told that buses were coming. Police drove by, windows rolled up, thumbs up signs. National Guard trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. Nobody stopped to drop off water. A helicopter dropped a load of water, but all the bottles exploded on impact due to the height of the helicopter.
The first day (Wednesday) four people died next to her. The second day (Thursday) six people died next to her. Denise told me the people around her all thought they had been sent there to die. Again, nobody stopped. The only buses that came were full; they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. They found out that those being dropped off had been rescued from rooftops and attics. They got off the buses delirious from lack of water and food, completely dehydrated. The crowd tried to keep them all in one area; Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their minds.
Inside the convention center, the place was one huge bathroom. In order to [defecate], you had to stand in other people’s [feces]. The floors were black and slick with [feces]. Most people stayed outside because the smell was so bad. but outside wasn’t much better: between the heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration … and there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk.
They slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.
Denise said yes, there were young men with guns there. But they organized the crowd. They went to Canal Street and “looted,” and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out “the buses are coming,” the young men with guns organized the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back, just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first.
Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were fist fights. She saw them put their guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd. But she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention center; their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and old people.
Yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. She saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit. He crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back. In front of the whole crowd. She saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to turn around, that they weren’t allowed to leave. So they all believed they were sent there to die.
Denise’s niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to call her mother’s boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and finally got through and told him where they were. The boyfriend, and Denise’s brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and came and got them. They had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into letting them into the city (“come on, man, my two-year-old niece is at the Convention Center!”), then they took back roads to get to them.
After arriving at my other cousin’s apartment in Baton Rouge, they saw the images on TV, and couldn’t believe how the media was portraying the people of New Orleans. She kept repeating to me on the phone last night, “make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die. Nobody came. Those young men with guns were protecting us. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have had the little water and food they had found.”
As easy as it is to criticize the Feds’ slow response during this crisis, it’s even easier to ask “why not use all those busses?” As others have pointed out, by the time the evacuation became mandatory, many of the qualified bus drivers had fled the area.
Sorry, but that doesn’t get a pass from me. Keeping qualified drivers until the last moment should be part of the plan, shouldn’t it?
“Sorry, but that doesn’t get a pass from me. Keeping qualified drivers until the last moment should be part of the plan, shouldn’t it?”
And how exactly do you do this? School bus drivers are like my neighbor…retired plumbers, housewives, regular joes. For many of them, driving a bus is their second, maybe third job. They have families, children, wives and husbands to care for. These aren’t emergency personnel, police officers, fire fighters, or national guard. They aren’t trained to respond to emergencies, they drive a bus. And they aren’t paid more than a pittance to do that. So, what are your ideas to making sure this group of normal people, with families of their own to care for, stick around until the last minute, endangering their own lives, and maybe the lives of their families, so they can drive the busses? Hëll, if trained police officers broke ranks and fled, how can you expect a bus driver to stand his ground?
Remember, we’re talking about moving a few thousand more people, maybe just a few hundred people. Around 1%, likely less than that, of the area’s population. Why focus so much on this one small “error,” when there was so much about the evacuation that went right?
And how exactly do you do this? School bus drivers are like my neighbor…
Well, for one thing, I would use school bus drivers in the initial phases, and use other personnel in the later phases (because more than likely you’re not getting return trips that late in the game); those other personnel should have training to drive busses.
It’s part of the details of an evacuation plan.
The military/National Guard/sheriff’s department/police/whoever-was-in-charge DOESN’T have ANYONE that can drive buses? Geez.
How do they transport prisoners from jail to prison? Outsourcing that has gotta be ÐÃMN expensive.
And, no, I dont consider the evacuation plan particularly successful; it’s not as well conceived as the Florida plan, where there’s an ongoing database of old and handicapped indviduals, which evacuation personnel can consult as they execute the plan.
At least local politicians wouldn’t take the national guard and other troops away from rescue operations for their own personal use.
Or would they…?
http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/HurricaneKatrina/story?id=1123495&page=1
Well, here’s the thing- the City of New Orleans had a plan and it involved using the dámņ buses! I would consider it backseat armchair quaterbacking to be pushing the bus issue otherwise. It’s easy to come up with should have been done afterwards. But when there is already a plan and then it is ignored or turns out to have been so badly planned that it might as well not have existed, then it’s perfectly legit to ask why.
If the city had a plan to use the buses but none to provide drivers or gas to them…what good was it?
As for my being crass on the issue of the 20% disabled–if I spoke out of turn I apologize. The school I work at has a whole parking lot full of busses and after inquiring, I find that we have exactly one that needs some work done on it to make it useable. So 20% seems quite high to me but maybe it is typical of city schools.
“I’m less tolerant of the moonbats because I think that their attempts to play the race card contribute to racial hatred in our society.”
Bill: That is crap. People on BOTH sides play the race card all the fûçkìņg time. Right-wing people play it by accusing left-wing of shouting “RACISM!” and left-wingers play it by accusing right-wingers of racism. It’s complete and utter bûllšhìŧ on both sides, and played equally by both sides. You’re doing it right now.