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| Home Front: Politix |
| CYA is a Big Job |
| 2005-09-07 |
| Steve Graham examines the actions of the parties involved and explains why events played out as they did. I guess there is no way to avoid getting into the finger-pointing contest taking place in connection with the New Orleans disaster. New Orleans is a corrupt city in an extremely corrupt state, and the state and local response to the hurricane was inept and irresponsible, and now the ineffective locals are doing their best to shift the blame onto President Bush, Congress, and FEMA. And the liberal press and the Democratic Party are helping them. Let's start with one simple fact. States and cities bear primary responsibility for preparing for and responding to their own problems, and Louisiana and New Orleans get a big fat "F" for their efforts. They can blame Bush all they want, but the fact remains, they blew it big-time and caused a catastrophe to which an adequate federal response was virtually impossible. It's amazing, how talking heads and Democrat politicians-and even some Louisiana Republicans-are trying to make this a federal failure. When did the federal government become society's diaper? If you don't take reasonable care of yourselves, shouldn't you expect to have terrible problems while Uncle Sam gears up to save you from yourself? How can anyone pretend to be surprised, or that the federal government is chiefly to blame? Article Continues Below Look at the failures on the local level. 1. Locals chose not to pay for an adequate flood control system. It was well within their means, and they had almost three hundred years to get it done. When they complain about the "Bush-Dominated" Congress's evil refusal to foot the whole bill, and they tell us how much more money was needed, they themselves quote a figure of about sixty million dollars. Don't tell me an entire state couldn't come up with sixty million dollars. As a reader of mine pointed out, they somehow came up with a hundred and thirty-eight million dollars to pay for a football stadium. But they chose to buy a Category Three system instead of the obviously necessary Category Five system. Now the bill will be in the tens of billions of dollars, and thousands of people are dead. And who believes that flood control improvements funded during the Bush administration would have been finished by the time Katrina arrived? It helps if your political career depends on believing it. 2. After assuring eventual disaster by refusing to pay for flood control projects, local officials failed to respond quickly enough to the threat of storm damage. They had a plan in place, and they failed to follow it. They were aware that many citizens had no transportation, yet they failed to identify them and take them to shelters. Here in Florida (and everywhere else), we respond to the approach of hurricanes by notifying FEMA, setting up shelters, and issuing evacuation orders well in advance of landfall. The mayor of New Orleans and other local officials dragged their feet. They didn't even open the Superdome to evacuees until noon on the day before the hurricane, and at first, they limited access to people with special needs. And the governor, who must request federal aid before Washington can come in and provide it, didn't formally invite the feds in until Monday. Florida's Democrat governor Lawton Chiles did the same thing after Andrew, and then he complained about FEMA's slow response. A bureaucrat's prime directive is "Cover your behind at all costs, and if you can blame your enemies in the process, so much the better." The failure of local officials is even more shocking when you realize that New Orleans-as they well knew-is a city built in a bowl surrounded by dirty water. A city whose floodwalls and levees were expected to fail in a severe storm. 3. A large number of local citizens refused to evacuate, ensuring that they and their children and pets would die. We're not supposed to talk about this, because it's "blaming the victims." I'm sorry to ask this, but when a person is a victim because of his own irresponsibility or bad judgment, isn't it an injustice to blame his suffering on someone else? In the course of ordinary life, when a parent makes an irresponsible choice that leads to the death of a child, do we exonerate them because of their searing, constant emotional pain? To the contrary. We do our best to put them in jail. I don't say people deserved to drown. Tiny children and invalids and elderly people died horribly in this catastrophe, and they are still dying, and the suffering beggars understanding. I suffered every time I heard the voice of a starving baby bird after Andrew; I can assure you that I feel pain over the immeasurable agony of Katrina's victims. If watching videos from New Orleans doesn't break your heart, there is something wrong with you, and if you don't want to help the survivors, regardless of their attitude or how much responsibility they bear, you must be made of stone. But many residents made-and continue to make-tragic choices that lead to unnecessary and incalculable misery. These choices caused a large portion of the problems with which New Orleans is now dealing. And they do not consitute a federal failing. Watch cable news for an hour, and you'll see or hear the same story over and over. A New Orleans resident refuses to leave a flooded house, days after the storm. In the driveway are one or two flooded cars this person could have used to flee. Rescuers have to argue and cajole to get this person and his or her children into the boat. And sometimes they still refuse to leave. This is AFTER the storm, mind you. There is no food, no clean water, no electricity, and no police protection, and these people still won't leave. How, by any stretch of the imagination, can it be fair to blame their pain on the federal government? I would even give local officials a pass on this problem. If these people won't leave for CNN, they would not have left for Ray Nagin. Pre-hurricane evacuation is always handled by locals, not FEMA, and residents have to cooperate in order for it to work. Isn't it unfair, then, to saddle the feds with primary responsibility for the deaths of people who stayed home and died? 4. The New Orleans police have disappeared. A deputy commander had the gall to blame the National Guard for taking two whole days to show up, and then for amusing themselves during down time by playing cards. Meanwhile, his own officers are gone, and some are too busy shoplifting to do their jobs. According to the National Guard, the New Orleans police department has "disintegrated," and part of the delay in restoring the city was caused by the need to obtain troops to replace the police. But somehow, the disorder is the Guard's fault. Here's what happened here: many of the deputy commander's subordinates proved cowardly and selfish, and they abandoned their jobs, and in order to avoid responsibility, he's launching a preemptive PR/CYA strike on the very people who are now doing his job for him. 5. Evacuation holdouts are shooting at the police and the Guard and contractors and everyone else they can draw a bead on. Call me crazy, but I think this discourages and slows down rescue efforts. General Honore has confirmed that in interviews. Even liberal Sean Penn wore a bulletproof vest on his highly publicized rescue missions. Here in Miami, after Andrew, people shot looters, not the police (who stayed on the job, unlike the New Orleans cops). Sure, the federal response could have been better. That's what happens when you shift your own responsibilities to the federal government. Like the flooding of the city, this was expected. Has anyone in New Orleans or the MSM been awake during the last two hundred years? Has the federal government EVER responded to a national disaster in less than two days? The federal government is like an ocean liner. It doesn't start and stop quickly. Local government, when it works properly, is much more responsive. You don't call the FBI when you see a burglar in your yard. You call the local police. Similarly, you don't wait for Washington to build your floodwalls and evacuate your citizens. New Orleans had buses. It had trains and planes. There were places it could have set up temporary shelters, and they could have been set up well before landfall. And the disaster should never have occurred in the first place; locals should have looked after their own flood control needs. But as I said, Uncle Sam is society's diaper, so none of that matters. Two things are going on here. First, local bureaucrats are sweating bullets. They let down their constituents-with fatal results-and they know they're in trouble, and a bureaucrat, by definition, cares more about his job than anything. Imagine how you would feel, if you screwed up at work and caused thousands of people to die. So they're desperate to find other people to blame. Second, for a long time, Democrats have had a policy of responding to every national development by finding some way to use it to hammer Bush. And this is just another example. I'm still waiting for someone like Michael Moore to say Karl Rove sent the storm to New Orleans so President Bush could steal Louisiana's oil. If you are familiar with the retrospective rantings of far-left kooks, you will realize that that is not much of an exaggeration. Democrats and local officials are so intoxicated with Bush Blame Disease that they are actually calling for post-Katrina hearings. If they get them, they'll find comparatively minor federal failings and egregious, unconscionable local failings. Ray Nagin will be burned at the stake. Governor Blanco may be the first liberal who actually has to move to France. Yes, the feds have made errors, and surely some of those errors have cost lives. But on the whole, they're the only group that has done much of anything right. The Louisiana bureaucracy amazes me. They're taking thousands of people killed largely by the failures of the bureaucracy itself, and they're turning them into a legion of Casey Sheehans. In retrospect, they're going to look heartless, tactless, and despicable. They could do themselves and New Orleans a world of good by considering that right now and trying to make up for their failings instead of blaming them on George Bush. |
| Posted by:Zhang Fei |
| #1 Steve is also the author of the book "Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man". |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-09-07 19:03 |