Crook and liars has a quote, along with a link to the video of Bob Shieffer’s commentary on the response to Katrina:
Finally, a personal thought. We have come through what may have been one of the worst weeks in America’s history, a week in which government at every level failed the people it was created to serve. There is no purpose for government except to improve the lives of its citizens. Yet as scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.
As the floodwaters rose, local officials in New Orleans ordered the city evacuated. They might as well have told their citizens to fly to the moon. How do you evacuate when you don’t have a car? No hint of intelligent design in any of this. This was just survival of the richest.”
The old man pulls no punches there. It give me a sense of hope for the MSM. I suppose the smell of rotting American corpses in a major American city has restored some of their sense of mission. The government at all levels needs to bear the blame for this.
We have FEMA to help out where disasters, man-made or otherwise, overwhelm the ability of local authorities to respond. In this case there was enough destruction in NO to gut local officials ability to do much about the aftermath. But, local officials damned well should have made plans to evacuate residents without a car. They did not and people died because of it.
That said, it is painfully obvious that the early response by FEMA was tragically lacking. Heads ought to roll over this, starting with FEMA director Brown and DHS head Chertoff. The highest levels of the Bush administration should be responsible for appointing Brown in the first place and for underfunding FEMA and the Army Core of Engineers flood control projects in the region.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. It’s certain that all levels of government failed at their most basic mission: protecting the lives and safety of the people. While I don’t believe there was any overt racism involved in this mess, I do believe that there was a neglect of the city’s poorest residents who were left to drown like rats. Does the fact that they were predominately black play a roll? I hope that we, as nation, have moved past that kind of thinking. But the fact remains that it happened, and it was both foreseeable and avoidable.
