All I'm saying is that W might have said that he "accepted some responsibility" but in reality, clearly the only person in the entire f***ing criminal administration that ACTUALLY took any responsibility is that incompetant idiot "Brownie" who clearly was way out of his league.

I expect Brownie's only real problem was that he was hoping to get some sort of direction from above, but W was on vacation and Cheney was nowhere to be found.

If W. were to ACTUALLY take responsibility for a disaster of the scale we witnessed every night on TV across the country- he would have himself resigned and handed the reins over to Uncle Dick.

And 1reguL8NSTi Honestly I was glad to hear you got out ahead of the flooding, I personally don't have any problems with you, but if you're calling me out like that- perhaps you can tell me how everything went for you- aparently something went right, (although I'm guessing things that did get done were in fact managed at the state or local level) since you and several hundred thousand others managed to get out OK.

I still contend that this administrations entire response in the immediate aftermath, not to mention their de-funding of army corps of engineering projects to stregnthen the levee systems was altogether criminally negligent- especially the behavior of the alleged commander in chief.

 

Maybe going out for photo ops and getting an honerary guitar could have waited a few more days? maybe he could have cut his vacation even two or three more days than he did? maybe not giving a rats *** about the catastrophe that was taking place in the Gulf coast region?

Every goddamn move he made was a mistake, going all the way back to appointing Brownie, all the way back to re-allocating funds from levee repair and reinforcement into the blanket black budget of homeland security, maybe a few of those things could have been mistakes?

At the top of the food chain, yes not one thing went right, and I probably would throw the governor and Mayor a share of the blame too, but it really should have been clear to any competant emergency manager that they needed federal disaster support headed that way before the strorm made landfall.

First of all I would have cut my vacation short the day that Katrina passed Florida and upped to a class 3-4- I would have been in constant contact with the National Guard Command and control, each of the governors in LA, MI, and AR, and gotten my FEMA guys to come up with ideas like mobilizing school busses to evacuate those that had no other means of evacuation. I would have declared the disaster area to be the low lying coastal parishes instead of the rest of Louisiana;

In short I would have made sure the people who know how to deal with this sort of situation are called in and given all of the tools and resources that can be allocated to help them deal with the obvious impending disaster while it happened.

I'm not "not blaming" them, I'm sure they made their share of mistakes, but at the same time they did what they could given the situation, and neither of them was on vacation!

They have those jobs and that responsibility because the people of Louisiana and the people of New Orleans elected them to those respective positions and their authority and responsibility is to their constituents, I am not among their constituents, so I think that is between them and the people they serve.

W is supposed to be serving the entire country- not just the people who paid to put him in the white house, but you'd never guess that from the way he behaves


Oh yeah that's got to be it! of course! that explains everything!

Only when they act like they are better than other people because of their skin color- I have little time for people who think like that regardless of what color they are.

 

Hind sight is 20/20.

The Governor has control over the NG and the Mayor over the school system, partially. So it wasn't Pres. Bush who, as an elected official by the people of the U.S., could have changed that. If the Governor or Mayor have not asked for help, he is only to assume that they have everything undercontrol.


He was just making a joke about Kayne's comment. Who for some STUPID reason 1) thought that the President ordered the troops to shoot black people, and 2) thinks that President Bush does not like black people.

I'm done. But Psoper, put a little more thought and research into your posts Thanks!

 

Yep, and leadership is forward thinking, so what's your point?

mine is that Bush is an ineffective LEADER.


yes, but the key word there is partially, their authority under normal circumstances has bounds and authorizations to deal with - that is precisely why we have things like disaster declarations at the state and federal level- issuing those is supposed to provide blanket authorization for emergency managers to allocate resources and coordinate evacuation prior to the disaster when possible, Then coordinate and provide infrastructure protection as much as reasonably possible during the event, And then coordinate rescue, clean up, and relocation efforts in the aftermath.

That was what FEMA was set up to do and that is what it has done on several occasions in the past, when it had qualified people in positions of authority instead of "favor pay-back" political appointees running the organization, and back when the C in C actually paid attention to the news around him.

That is complete and utter bul$&it and you know it, for crying out loud- EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT means sending in people who COORDINATE resources, its a simple management issue, you put people who know how to respond and know how to handle and bridge resources from amongst mutiple command and control structures and respond by directing resources where they are needed and can be most effective.
It is not a job for everyone, but effective leadership in that role really shouldn't be too much to ask for, and it makes the difference between successful evacuation efforts and well handled disasters or what we saw these last couple of weeks- massive tragedies.

And the fact is that it could have been even worse than it was, an awful lot of people did get out before the storm struck. When we get a 7pt + earthquake out here, nobody is going to be tracing its path on the weather station a week ahead of time.

And since that came up again- Kanye was almost right about one thing, in saying "Bush doesn't care about black people"- the real truth is that Bush cannot relate to poor people- regardless of color.The fact is that he has never been one, or for that matter had to spend any significant amount of time in the company of any people below the income level that most of us might consider regular to upper middle class. He has never actually had to work a day in his life. Yeah he's had "job's" but he has NEVER HAD to actually WORK at any of them.

He has never wondered whether to have ramen noodles or macaroni and cheese for the next three nights before his next paycheck comes in. The guy is simply and purely incapable of having any true empathy for people much below his "station".

And two weeks ago the whole world got to see how ugly that can be.

You might consider your own advice sometime, by the way- what are you studying there at Penn state?

 

Alright, to set things straight I'm going to state again (for about the 4833rd time) I have to animosity towards anyone in the politics forum as long as what they talk about a) has relevance to the thread topic b) is in some way viewing the politics we discuss from a constructive standpoint. psoper and dre. I appreciate all you have to say in all your posts. It doesn't mean I agree with it (believe it or not sometimes I do) but I accept it nonetheless. If we all agreed on every issue politically how in the hell would America make any progress. It's all about finding the happy medium and in that progress (usually) comes. Great ideas and downright retarded ones have come from both political parties. I'm just saying this because I think in the past months we have neglected to use this forum for what it is. Although it is a debate we often lose ourselves in what has happened and forget about what could be done. That being said I feel obligated to say that although local authorities did have severe shortcomings after the storm there actions prior to were what I would call above standard. The did provide transportation to everyone that wanted it to execute the mandatory evacuation and they kept the city from utter chaos which seemed to linger on the brink for the time that I was there. But they did avoid it. They evacuated the 35th largest city in America with the exception of about 50,000 people and in the whole scheme of things that's pretty impressive. Mistakes were evidently made. Had we planned for this hurricane years in advance (which I def. think we should have) mistakes still would have been made. I also think it is notable to mention that we deployed more than 1/5th the troops that participated in the Battle of the Bulge (largest Armed land battle ever) in only 3 days. Again, noteworthy in the scheme of things. I think what was neglected that would have made a huge difference would have been staging supplies in places like Baton Rouge, Hammond, Shreveport, Jackson, etc... so that when the hurricane finally subsided we could quickly facility the troops and gov't that went in to help. The people were there but we had nothing to work with. The military was far better off then gov't organizations in that we had transportation, food, water, etc... were as many of these gov't employees seemed to be almost refugees themselves. Anyway, back to the topic. Let's give some credit where it is due. I'll be the first to say that Bush admitting a mistake is a landfall event. I'll pat him on the back for that but the rest of you should at least acknowledge it. There I'm done.

 

Ive got psoper's back so there!












:banana:

 

Me too