My response to a "Don't Blame Bush" email

lostnfound

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Thu Sep-08-05 07:05 PM
Original message

My response to a "Don't Blame Bush" email

Edited on Thu Sep-08-05 07:10 PM by lostnfound

An email I had received said that the Democratic mayor and governor were incompetent and corrupt and the Bush did everything he could, etc... It was from a close relative. I worked hard to gather all the links to try to send a somewhat cohesive email, which follows. First, my email:

Blame Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin, fine. People on the left don't feel as much of a need to believe that their leaders are blame-free. Or godlike. Or divinely directed.

Could Blanco or Nagin have done more? Maybe. Probably. But they asked for help and got basically no effective assistance for 5 days after the disaster. If New Orleans had been in Aceh or Sri Lanka, it might have received faster help. Did this disaster affect New Orleans only? I don't want to have ten thousand people floating around dead in ANY American city. No cholera epidemics. No massive breeding ground for deadly diseases either. No visiting on business or pleasure to any city that's might turn into a horror movie without hope overnight. In the rest of the world, it's not the reputation of Louisiana that just got destroyed -- the rest of the world is NOT thinking "How can Louisiana allow such a terrible thing to happen?" right now.

The President had primary responsibility, and here's why: Governor Blanco sent a letter to President Bush on Friday August 26th, before the hurricane hit, asking for emergency help and stating that the hurricane "will be of such severity and magnitude that effective response will be beyond the capabilities of the State and the affected local governments." And President Bush accepted responsibility on Friday August 26th, before the hurricane had even hit, by declaring it an emergency and authorizing FEMA "to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population". Under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, passed by Congress and signed into law by George W. Bush, primary responsibility for any emergency of this magnitude always falls to the Department of Homeland Security.

The United States National Response Plan (NRP) addresses how the federal government will handle emergencies. According to the NRP, "ALL PRESIDENTIALLY DECLARED DISASTERS AND EMERGENCIES UNDER THE STAFFORD ACT ARE CONSIDERED INCIDENTS OF NATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE." (NRP, 7) President Bush's declaration explicitly invoked Title V of the Stafford Act -- so Hurricane Katrina was automatically considered an incident of national significance as of August 26th.

Federal government has broad responsibilities in the event of an "Incident of National Significance". For example, the "Secretary of Homeland Security initiates actions to prepare for, respond to, and recover from the incident" and "The President leads the Nation in responding efficiently and ensuring the necessary resources are applied quickly and effectively to all Incidents of National Significance." There's a whole section specifically calling for the Federal government to be proactive in responding to catastrophic events.

So why did FEMA drop the ball?

FEMA shouldn't exist, according to some right-wing ideologues -- the federal government has no role in helping ordinary people survive disasters.

Now, I can sympathize with the concept of bringing things down to the state level whenever possible. People point to the inefficiency of government agencies and the danger of concentrating power. Personally, I think it is more inefficient to try to duplicate equipment at the state level for every possible massive disaster. And standing by when the city built around your nation's largest port is utterly destroyed isn't conducive to national security.

But if the right-wingers really want to kill FEMA and have each state handle it all, at least have a smooth transition. Instead, President Bush took FEMA, a capable agency in the '90s, and disabled it, re-stocking it with political appointees like Director Brown -- a failed horse-trainer-in-chief and roommate to a Bush campaign manager -- and Rhode and Morris, with no relevant work experience. Did he shrink government bureaucracy, or just replace it with incompetents? And just what is the purpose of that big Bush bureaucracy "Department of Homeland Security"? If a terrorist had blown up the levee, then would DHS have strutted its stuff?

In June, Pleasant Mann, a 16-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency�s government employee union, wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency�s decay. �Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation�s emergency management capability is being eroded,� he wrote. �Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors.� Disaster in the Making, Sept. 29, 2004

How much help was the 'new' FEMA after Hurricane Katrina? FEMA had already shown an interest in New Orleans -- in April 2001, FEMA identified the 3 biggest catastrophes likely to hit the U.S. -- a New Orleans hurricane, a terrorist attack on New York city and a San Francisco earthquake. And FEMA hired a private company for $500,000 in June 2004 to develop a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for Southeast Louisiana and New Orleans

But mostly, the new FEMA was a hindrance:
FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help evacuating | FEMA turns away experienced firefighters | FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks | FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel | FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food | FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans | FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid | FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board | FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck | FEMA turns away generators(See entry from 3:32 P.M. by Ben Morris, Slidell mayor) | FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"

Why?? It's impossible to understand. Claims of widespread shooting seems ludicrous; CNN was there, various volunteers were there. Video of local residents rescuing people by boat as late as Saturday night showed help still hasn't arrived ("why aren't there 50 inflatable boats in the water working a grid making sure all these people are out of here? Why is it just volunteers? That's the only people you see around. And on top of that they're trying to stop volunteers from coming in.") and there are still people trapped in their attics.

Where was the leadership? It's very likely that this disaster killed more Americans than 9-11. Where were our leaders?

While George Bush was eating cake with John McCain, rats were eating American corpses in American cities. While George Bush was strumming a dissonant chord with a country singer, a dissonant, desperate cry for help went unheeded from American voices in American cities. While Dick Cheney was closing on a posh new house, floodwaters were closing in on many more American houses, and, even worse, their owners. While Donald Rumsfeld was enjoying a game in an American baseball stadium, American citizens were dying in an American football stadium. While Condoleeza Rice was delightedly prancing through Manhattan shops in search of shoes, American citizens were desperately sloshing through New Orleans buildings in search of drinkable water. The largest natural disaster in modern American history is no time for absentee government, but that's what we got.

(Just one radical interjection: The Corporate News Networks (all part of the so-called "Liberal Media", owned by well-known liberals like GE) will eventually -- after a shocking lapse into the ugly reality of people drowning in their attics and dying of dehydration locked inside a dome in a collapsed American city, while help from the world's #1 superpower is absent from the scene for 4+ days -- return to its proper functions of confusing and consoling us as citizens, and accelerating consumption for the benefit of corporate advertisers.)

->"Michael Savage is correct, Liberalism is a mental disease."
Some of these right-wing pundits like Savage just won't be happy until they chop off the entire left-hand side of this Republic. Then we can be a balanced country with only one wing. The message is "stay with the Pack on the Side of the Right."

And the underlying motto is, All's well as long as the (divinely directed) President Bush isn't held accountable for anything.

My dear conservatives, politics is not a game of tug-of-war. Pulling permanently as hard as you can in one direction is not going to keep one side clean while the other falls in a mudhole. When our infrastructure is in ruins, it's not good for any of us. We need each other, liberals and conservatives, and we need some stability in government. Some balance.

(and the infamous Grover Norquist "drown it in a bathtub" quote superimposed above the drowned city of New Orleans.)

*****
I'm depressed tonight, though, since the reply I got was even worse:

The Governor, Mayor and the 100,000 plus stupid people who stayed in that city are a joke. The Governor is a worthless coward who is afraid to make a decision. The Federal government response was awesome considering the size of this hurricane.

**********
I replied with a reminder of how our own mother refused to evacuate a hurricane years ago, and that we had simply been luckier, not 'less stupid'. And that he should try reading some foreign newspapers to get perspectives outside of the right-wing propaganda.

This has been a crummy week (and at least I still have a home and a life and an intact family.) Seriously, though, I hate horror movies and sci-fi and war movies, and life in the Divided States of America is seeming just like a combination of those three.

It's only my faith that gets me through. Some combination of chaos theory, relativity, quantum physics, the remnants of youthful Catholicism, and an appreciation for Jungian thinking. And a great debt for having been raised by loving parents.