Republicat Lessons We Will Learn from New Orleans

[BigV]

Originally Posted by richlevy

I don't believe it. I did a Google search and found no reference. Could you cite a source and provide a link?

Noone could be that clueless.---snip

I tried and failed to find a link. tw and bluecuracao nailed it though. I also found the link tw cited and is now dead. I don't doubt it. But I *did* hear it twice. The man should not speak extemporaneously. I reckon his PR people shudder when he approaches a microphone without his notes. I don't mean this to be a Bush Bash, but criminy! Somebody buy this man a compassion clue. Seriously.

edit:

This is what I mean.

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
-- George W. Bush, 9/1/05

"Experts have warned for years that the levees and pumps that usually keep New Orleans dry have no chance against a direct hit by a Category 5 storm."
-- AP story, 8/29/05

[warch]

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)


Again, I want to thank you all for -- and, Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The FEMA Director is working 24 -- (applause) -- they're working 24 hours a day.

From the Whitehouse.gov news release 9/2

It doesnt seem that ol' Brownie has done such a heck of a job to me. He may be putting in clock hours, working hard at that, lots of press conferences, but not actually leading very competently. Yes its a tough gig, but it's his gig. I have little sympathy, far less praise.

The active military leadership that arrived finally today 9/3 seem to be a "heck" of a lot more effectively coordinating info, security, and aid. They get my applause.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by warch

We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)

Actually, my understanding is that there will be a 'Compassionate Work Projects Act' established to provide jobs for displaced residents. The entire $10 million dollar budget will be used to hire and train residents to rebuild Trent Lott's house.

The previous statement was a joke (I hope).

[Undertoad]

David Brooks makes the case that this is a tipping point of history, the beginning of the fourth turning crisis cycle:

Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law and order. (Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk.) Maybe there will be call for McCainist patriotism and nonpartisan independence. All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.

[warch]

god. Seeing that Jefferson Parish guy break down in pain and frustration when telling of the slow, heartbreaking desertion/death of his coworkers' mama....I get teary just thinking about it. I tried to describe it to my mom and couldnt describe it with out sobbing. That captured some horror.

[richlevy]

I find it odd that the story that some people are latching onto is the separation of a kid from his dog.

At the back end of the line, people jammed against police barricades in the rain. Refugees passed out and had to be lifted hand-over-hand overhead to medics. Pets were not allowed on the bus, and when a police officer confiscated a little boy's dog, the child cried until he vomited. "Snowball, Snowball," he cried.

People are unable to wrap their minds around the concept of thousands of deaths, a number of them from dehydration, in the richest country in the world. The plight of a boy and his dog seems to reduce the horrendous reality to a single manageable scene of pathos.

[Elspode]

The backlash from this event is going to cost the Republicans most of the gains they've made in the South, and probably a lot of other places as well.

Look for the Republican majority to start shrinking in the next election.

[tw]

Does this mean the Republicans will never hold a convention in the New Orleans Convention Center?

[mrnoodle]

Interesting article I received in e-mail.

An Unnatural Disaster:
A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
TIA Daily -- Sept. 2, 2005


It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inad equate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed; they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on , here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people respond ing to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished .)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and d oing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[Nightsong]

First and fore most. I AM NOT A BUSH SUPPORTER. I am a libertarian IF I mustlist an affiliation. I find the modern republicans nearly as distasteful as I do the dems, but beyond party line is the definition liberal or conservative. That crosses party lines. As I sit reading these post, first time in ages I have had time, I am disgusted with nearly the lot of you.

Almost all of you wanna blame the president of the country in things that are not his damned fault. THe failure to have a disaster plan?
The Mayor of NO.
Failure to get federal aid as fast as possible?
THe Govenor of LA
THe reason the feds screwed up when they where called in?
THe head of FEMA.(although I will give that he is an appiontee as well as a failure)

The federal goverment has failed us. Yes. By not keeping our borders but that is nearly the only job the feds actually have. THe disaster in NO is the DIRECT result of a liberal goverment in both the city and the state. Has Bush done a great job? Not really but then the last decent president we had was Nixon, a man who at least took the bullet when his people 'f'd up.

If you must bash stick to his failures on the Borders. Remember that energy problem are made worse by the fact that not only are we stuck with oil companies<bush is only a minor symptom> but because Environuts wont let us do anything either way to fix the situation.

As far as the Katrina disaster, put the blame where it belongs. With the local goverment who dropped the ball and now are slinking with their tail between their legs to beg for help from the feds.

Almost all politicitans are lying jerk, but then I never trust anybody that volunteers for a job like that.

speaking from experience
A HUGO survivor

[Happy Monkey]

Blame the victims. If we can convince the public they were all criminals and welfare queens, maybe people won't care that they died!

As far as the Katrina disaster, put the blame where it belongs. With the local goverment who dropped the ball and now are slinking with their tail between their legs to beg for help from the feds.

The feds are supposed to be there to pick up dropped balls. That's what a federal State of Emergency is for.

[warch]

Bush may be given a walk on this. Fucking amazing. I shouldnt be surprised anymore.

[mrnoodle]

No, the victims aren't to blame for the hurricane. The magnitude of their suffering, however, is directly connected to the local government's unwillingness to choose prosperity and responsibility over entitlement and welfare.

That said, EVERYONE in New Orleans was wiped out. It's about human suffering, not black suffering. Rich people can rebuild, the poor can't without help. But the rescue workers and (vile Bush robot) military personnel are of all colors and backgrounds, and don't see race or class -- they see people in need. Time to get behind them with our wallets and words and leave the retarded partisanship behind. An entire American city has been wiped out, and all people can talk about is whether or not Bush directly caused the hurricane or simply likes eating babies.

[Happy Monkey]

The Bush Administration mantra: Everyone but us should take personal responsibility, and everyone but us should stop with the partisan attacks. The buck stops there. You can't support the troops (or rescue workers) while criticizing the top leadership. No finger pointing during a crisis. No finger pointing after a crisis. Finger pointing before a crisis will not be acknowledged.

[wolf]

Can someone explain to me why 72 hour relief response time was great for the Indonesian Tsunami, but is a National Tragedy for Which Bush is at Fault in New Orleans?