Comments on: DHS selling Bullshit; CNN not Buying

By: dale

dale — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 07:44:51 +0000

russell (comment 4, above): look up the status of the local national guard, their current deployment, and, specifically, the deployment of their equipment and logistics.

By: Sumana

Sumana — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 06:44:36 +0000

“Chyort” is Russian for “devil.” As in “k chyortu!” for “To the devil!”

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 02:09:24 +0000

Chertoff is also one of the smartest people in DC (at least, he’s one of the smartest in the way that people at CT are smart, which, considering the evidence of the last week here, may not mean as much as it used to). Go read isthatlegal.org for the views of someone who knows him a bit.

russell, this may surprise you, especially if you are dumb enough to get your news from a tv camera, but the flooding and the hurricane were, in a very real sense, two separate events. If the hurricane had directly hit NO and then the levees broke in NO, that would have been a much simpler event to respond to. As it was, the storm hit Mississippi directly, and the most extensive damage from the storm surge is in Mississippi and Alabama, not in Louisiana. Only the next day—perhaps after resources were shifted because of what was then known about the most severe impact of the storm (I say perhaps because, unlike, say Kieran (aka “the Mark Steyn of the left, but without the verve”), we really don’t know what happened. But sentence first, trial later.)—did the levees break.

By: Fergal

Fergal — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 19:37:52 +0000

He is Jewish, though

Ah, yes, trust Abb1 to get that on record. (Is that better or worse than “zionist”?) And, what about you Abb1? Can we have your ethnic and/or religious identification… just for the record and purposes of irony, of course? (Full disclosure: I’m a self-loving Irish atheist.)

By: jonathan

jonathan — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 19:14:42 +0000

There is nothing wrong with anti-semitism, as long as it is directed at one person, which just makes it justified hate, in stead of “anti-semitism”.

But this guy is minister and still stays in power?

By: Randy Paul

Randy Paul — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 16:56:33 +0000

Abb1,

Let’s just stick to the fact that Chertoff means devil in Russian and leave it at that.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 16:43:53 +0000

Chertoff’s character was revealed during the Whitewater hearings. As the majority counsel, he conducted highly partisan interrogations asking long series of questions whose premises he knew to be false. Watching him on televisiion, I remember thinking that this is what Roy Cohn must have been like.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 15:03:34 +0000

Of course Chertoff is not the anointed media saint that Condi is so maybe he’s been over-optimistic.

He is Jewish, though. Calling him a liar would border on anti-Semitism (or self-hatred).

By: Procrastinator

Procrastinator — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 14:30:43 +0000

Chertoff is also the man who said there were adequate disaster plans, but these were “hampered by the flooding”.

By: RoyalTS » Blog Archive » Wise words

RoyalTS » Blog Archive » Wise words — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 14:26:05 +0000

[...] from Jim Henley via Crooked Timber: From what I can tell in the last couple days’ reading, Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.) Environmentalists amaze themselves with the realization that Katrina proves we need cars with better gas mileage and religious nuts of all persuasions discern the hand of God smiting their – and, need it be said, his own – enemies. [...]

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 13:42:28 +0000

Good point, Derek.

By: derek

derek — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 08:50:12 +0000

Sadly, CNN is in this article going along with something I’ve started noticing in the wingnuts talking points: Chertoff and Brown identifying themselves as FEMA, falsely claiming that FEMA didn’t anticipate the disaster, then etting FEMA take the heat for being a “useless government agency”.

I may have missed it, but all of CNN’s contradictions to Chertoff’s claim are from non-FEMA sources, leaving the reader to conclude that FEMA didn’t see this coming. They did. It’s the Republican appointees parachuted in to be their bosses who didn’t pay attention, and the appointees are going to try to blame that on the people who worked for them.

By: Offshore Pundit

Offshore Pundit — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 08:23:23 +0000

Jim Harrison – I suggest you read Tuchman’s “March of Folly”. Some governments are incapable of acting rationally.

By: Ian Whitchurch

Ian Whitchurch — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 03:36:56 +0000

Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Ian Whitchurch

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 03:36:53 +0000

It’s news to me that anybody politicized 9/11. With the exception of a few despised pacifists and lefties, both the Republicans and the Democrats lined up behind Bush despite the fact that the one obvious fact was that he hadn’t prevented a national tragedy. We were just too frightened to use our critical faculties. Hence the absurd notion that Bush acted well in the aftermath of the disaster when he did a few obvious PR things and then proceeded to bungle ever single step afterwards by letting Bin Laden escape in Afghanistan, screwing up America’s public finances to pay off his friends, conducting a war that was as irrelevant to vital national purposes as it was illegal by international law, and utterly ignoring the looming oil price crisis.

In a rational world, we’d figure out how to make an example of Bush and his whole crew so as to discourage future administrations from acting in a similarly negligent fashion.