Forty years ago, Teddy Kennedy left a woman in a car to drown.
Four years ago, George Bush left an entire city to drown.
Guess which one still upsets the Republicans?
- via Suburban Guerrilla
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Forty years ago, Teddy Kennedy left a woman in a car to drown.
Four years ago, George Bush left an entire city to drown.
Guess which one still upsets the Republicans?
- via Suburban Guerrilla
6 comments:
Rick,
That's bs. The locals blew the evacuation not the feds. If you want to blame the messy aftermath on the feds, you don't have a gripe with me but I'll note everyone has blame to share there.
Bill
You're probably right, Bill, but I think that this thought encompasses the entire event.
Also, I distinctly remember pictures of Bush eating birthday cake with McCain and strumming a guitar and having a good old time as Katrina hit New Orleans.
.
Harsh, neither is right. Both were very wrong in their actions, one caused more death because of the scale, but both were wrong. I understand the point is not to absolve one and punish the other, merely to make the point, but I think it's a poor choice.
Florida Masochist,
You might want to check your facts. Before Katrina hit, the best estimate the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans had for an evacuation was that they could get 70% of the population out. They got close to 90% out. In other words, they did a better job of evacuating than even their best case scenarios predicted.
The evacuation wasn't the problem--the aftermath was, and given the infrastructure damage that the storm and the levee breaches did, there's really only one direction to point the finger--at the director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, who has somehow managed to dodge most of the blame. Local and state officials could have done better, but they were a little overwhelmed. DC had no excuse--they were criminally incompetent.
Criminally incompetent???
Wow.
March 2006:
Video has been obtained by a US news agency showing President George W Bush being briefed by officials on the eve of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The confidential video obtained by the Associated Press shows very strong warnings being given to Mr Bush about the potential strength of the storm.
It appears to contradict subsequent suggestions by the Bush administration that the threat had been unclear.
Critics say more could have been done sooner to evacuate the city.
Speaking by video link from a room in his Texan holiday ranch on 28 August last year, Mr Bush is shown telling officials: “We are fully prepared.”
He does not ask any questions as the situation is outlined to him.
Along with the video, AP obtained transcripts of seven days of briefings relating to Katrina.
The footage does the president no favours, the BBC’s Justin Webb reports from Washington.
It shows plainly worried officials telling Mr Bush very clearly before the storm hit that it could breach New Orleans’ flood barriers.
In the past, the president has said nobody anticipated a breach but the video shows Michael Brown, the top emergency response official who has since resigned, saying the storm would be “a bad one, a big one”.
“We’re going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,” Mr Brown says.
He also gives a strong, clear warning that evacuees in the Superdome in New Orleans could not be given proper assistance.
Another official, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, tells the final briefing that storm models predict minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane.
But he adds that the possibility of anticlockwise winds and storm surges could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun afterwards is “obviously a very, very grave concern”.
His concern was borne out by events when levees collapsed, letting in the floodwater disastrously.
The president, however, said four days after the storm: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”
Mr Bush later accepted he shared some of the responsibility for the flawed response to Katrina and the White House talked of the “fog of war” rendering decision-making difficult.
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