The fact of the matter is that under other presidents, the federal government has responded well to crises like this one.

Sure, in this crisis the mayor made mistakes, but a parking lot full of school buses weren’t ever going to get the job done.

I don’t care if you think the federal government is no good. Whether you like it or not, this is the only level of government that can respond to a crisis of these proportions. Think for a second about what happened in New Orleans—massive physical damage to buildings and roads, loss of the entire energy infrastucture, followed by massive flooding. A catastrophic hurricane releases the same energy as 10-15 atom bombs. There’s a reason people compared Katrina’s path to a war zone.

I’m sorry, but it’s downright nuts to pretend that the appropriate policy approach is for a city mayor to MacGyver his way out of this situation. At the end of the day, he’s got 1500 cops and, what, 1,000 firemen? Sure, in this crisis the mayor made mistakes, but a parking lot full of school buses weren’t ever going to get the job done.

A plan that relies on locals to protect our nation’s largest port city during a crisis of this magnitude is as obviously inadequate as a plan that relies on a little boy sticking his finger in the levees to keep the water back.

This was a crisis we’ve known for years was coming. Putting unqualified cronies in charge of the agency responsible for dealing with this crisis suggests that one is not serious about fulfilling one’s responsibilities during the coming crisis. Staying on vacation for three days while these cronies fail to realize this is a catstrophe and respond accordingly suggests that one is not serious. And allowing your administration to focus its energy on siezing powers you do not need and failing to execute a response using powers you have been given to respond to precisely this situation demonstrates that your administration is mindbogglingly incompetent.

The fact of the matter is that under other presidents, the federal government has responded well to crises like this one. Saying “federal government bad” really does not excuse this incompetence, especially under a President who has campaigned by saying that because of him, you’re safer now than you were 4 years ago.

Katrina is EXACTLY the kind of crisis where Presidential leadership matters—before, during, and after the crisis. And we saw in this President that his idea of leadership isn’t about getting results, it’s political—it’s about passing the buck and spinning the press. Neither was possible in Katrina.

Hey, it rhymes, I wrote a poem. Cool.

Pay no attention to John. He is a retired courtesy clerk (i.e. cashier) who never achieved anything what-so-ever in his life. He failed out of college, is divorced, and his only kid is a nutcase failure who thinks strumming a guitar while he drools is the height of artistic style. He lives in poverty and whiles away his days getting into intense internet arguments with people who are actually productive and sane.

Katrina was win-win for you, of course.

Katrina was win-win for you, of course. You were able to zing the local Democrats, and at the same time use the Bush administrations self-serving nonfeasance justify your view that the federal government is no damn good.

And you have invented a hodge-podge of constitutional and practical reasons why certain reponsibilities are ideally local rather than federal. You have puffed this up into a silly claim that for the feds to have done more than they did before Katrina would have been terrible thing, even though it might have made outcomes better.

You’re not talking about one of the important Constitutional fed-state boundaries. There are various things the feds could have done in the face of incompetent local government, and none of these would have sent the federal system crashing to the ground. The role of the federal government has a lot of flex no matter which party is in power, and deciding what that role is to be is one of the main things we elect Presidents to do. As I understand, your opinion is that the Bush administration decided wisely in this case, but looking on the results, I’d say that your opinion is crap.

I’m not going to argue whichever point you’ve decided is the main one here. There were multiple ways in which the Bush administration’s pre-Katrina efforts were defective by any standard. You’ve chosen to highlight one case where you think the locals were worse and the Feds had no constitutional responsibility.

But along the way you made a number of excessively general, dogmatic, ideological statements in 38, 43, and 49 which led me to believe that we weren’t talking about anything specific, and that I was just dealing with version 1001 of the same old libertarian rant. I responded accordingly.

So what you are saying is that the federal government, before the hurricane hit, should have forced LA to better prepare for the possibility of disaster? Because I just want to be clear about this.

Because it is an article of faith deep in your heart that government is just plain no damn good, you will never, ever, be able to distinguish between better government and worse government, nor will you ever try to, and you will actually cheerlead “anti-government” governmental leaders like Bush or Schwarzenegger who deliberately sabotage government in order to increase the mindless anti-government cynicism of the blind, ignorant masses of little jets out there.

Everything that was not done, or that was done badly in NOLA, has been done well elsewhere in the world. Most of Holland is below sea level, for example. Grand Forks was destroyed by a wintertime flood a few years back, but that was under Clinton, not Bush, and it was white people, so the government reponse was adequate. Downstream in Winnipeg damage was slight, because the jackbooted, parasitical thugs of Canadian Communism had used the tax dollars of the poor, helpless Manitobans to force them to prepare for a big flood which no one could prove was even going to come at all.

I don’t think you are seeing the difference between preparation before the hurricane and then response after the hurricane. At least I hope you were misunderstanding and not just creating straw men for your own amusement.

So yes I fault the feds for the pitiful response during the flooding, but not nearly as much as you do. The set of responsibilities they had changed 180 degrees when the levies broke (from support and supply to rescue and security), and it is an article of faith deep in my heart that government is the least flexible institution ever created.

And because all of the blame has been shifted to Bush (at least by those who matter), the government of LA will not change. The most corrupt state, city, and police force in the Union will remain as it was before. Because they’ll be able to blame Bush and FEMA, just as everyone else is.

Hey, don’t diss USENET. No blog can beat rmmgj yet for knowledge and being interesting to follow. (And no public p2p service is as fast, if you’ve got half a decent ISP)

And yes, blogs could use a killfile standard. And a resurrection of Emily Postnews –
(From the early 1990’s)

Q: They just announced on the radio that the United States has invaded Iraq. Should I post?

A: Of course. [...]

No better predictor of the blogosphere as Emily.

Jet is in sych with the Bush administration about one thing. Jet believes as dogma that federal intervention would be no good in any case, and the Bush administration is doing it’s damnedest to give jet evidence for his dogma.

Luckily for the Bush people, our conservatarian friends have by and large avoided speciifics of what the Bush people did and didn’t do. Philosophical gassing is great if you want to divert attention from actuality.

Bicmacattack succeeded in finding someone in his own stupidity class! Let’s all give him a round of applause!

Try again, jet.

The loathesome thing about this is that all along Bush has been using a 9/11 “state of emergency” to bully Congress and override all constitutional protections.

But we still have bots here willing to argue that an actual state of emergency, in New Orleans, should NOT be treated as a state of emergency, but should be handled according to assigned routine.

Jesus fuck, aren’t libertarians fun?

Meet real life.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/09/katrina.survivors

Let me produce the relavent section –
‘Before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on Sunday, August 28, Debbie said she hadn’t paid much attention to the warnings and didn’t want to evacuate without the family’s pets. “I never once dreamed … I just thought it would be a little wind and rain and then it would just blow over.”

The family had lived in the three-bedroom house on Arts Street for 13 years. Melissa Harold, the grandmother, moved in several years ago after Debbie’s husband died. They lived with three dogs, a cat, a guinea pig, a gerbil, six hamsters and a parakeet.

“My mom told us we weren’t leaving because wherever we went, we couldn’t bring our animals with us,” said Tiffany, who wants to be a veterinarian and mourned leaving behind the pets, including those buried in the back yard.’