Thank you, Mr. President

[Erlikkhan]

Whose bush are we talking about anyway? I thought most girls shaved these days. Sounds a little smelly to me.

 

[cantdog]

My feelings have changed over the course of the last week or so. My first feelings, like everyone else, were horror and disbelief. As the days lengthened and still no help was sent to New Orleans, my feelings turned to anger.

I understand that my vehement opposition to Pres Bush makes one think that I was looking for an excuse to attack him, but that just isn't so. I was just plain angry, regardless of the political stripe of the Mayor, the Governor, or the President. I mostly blamed the President under the assumption that he had ultimate authority - which is true.

Watching what went down after the feds finally sprung into action - too late, of course - it now seems to me that this thing was mostly a cluster fuck caused by the inability of the people at the top to determine who was in charge.

Michael Brown looks like the short-term guy with the "your're it" syndrome, i.e. he's the designated loser for now until the administration figures out if they have to sacrifice anyone else who is higher up on the food chain.

But it looks like the problem was mostly due to the reconfiguration of the government after 9/11, downgrading the status of FEMA and placing political cronies at key positions in that agency. The issue of who really was in charge was apparently a nebulous one, especially in the eyes of the only ones that mattered: the higher ups at FEMA and Homeland Security.

Each guy was looking for someone else to make the decisions, or waiting for the states to make the decisions for them.

Of course the President isn't completely absolved from blame. He should have come back from his vacation early and applied some pressure. That WOULD have gotten things moving, as it eventually did.

The administration made bad choices when it downgraded FEMA to a sub-agency of Homeland Security. It made bad choices when it fired the experienced men at the top of FEMA and replaced them with politcal gladhanders.

The mechanism should have sprung into action and it didn't. There is plenty of blame to go around, but I see no malicious intent, just ineptitude. Those calling this a racist (lack of) response by the President - or at the very least an economic decision - are almost surely wrong.

The mechanism wasn't working properly and no one knew it because they hadn't been confronted with a major emergency since the changes to the mechanism went into effect. Well, now we know the mechanism is broken.

I am confident (pretty much) that by the time the next emergency hits, the government will have learned the lesson of Katrina. FEMA will have authority and experienced leaders. And the government's response will be quick and effective, regardless of who is President.

I feel a need to leaven what you say here. The sad fact is, no one on God's green earth could afford to be really prepared for a disaster of this scale. The cities are the most laughably unprepared because they simply will never have that kind of budget.

The ONLY exception to that rule, and until you check into the massive prices of helicopters and trained rescue personnel do not doubt me, is the U.S. military, which yearly eats billions in monies, more than they can keep count of, more than they can keep track of, more than they can even manage to waste.

The most effective forces were therefore the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, and similar people. The Mayor could never conceivably have paid, on an ongoing basis, for a tithe of that stuff. It is purblind to think he could. He does, though, know exactly what he does have and where it's likely to be. Local people are the experts on where to start, what to expect, what's in place already. If they are actually interested in running a city. Sometimes it's the fire chief who shines, sometimes a police chief or a commissioner of public works, or a mayor or a city manager. But there is usually some jamoke in a situation like this, which overwhelms all normally-scaled responses, who knows what's what.

The state people are absolutely BOUND to be responding later than the locals, and with less savvy, and with the overriding knowledge that only the military can really do the job. It kinda paralyzes them, unless the primary responsibility has been with the state right along. In the case of wildfires, it is a state organization, the fire warden service, which is by law completely in charge in my state. We take wildland fires VERY seriously. In law, the fire warden OWNS the property if it's burning. He can choose to do whatever he likes. Sacrifice it, let it burn, aggressively fight, choose to lose half. Whatever. He commands every local fire department. He can comandeer relevant gear, equipment, water, anything, really. And that's his job.

But in the absence of a clear state-level mandate, the state is ordinarily going, realistically, only to be faulted for lapses in education and training of local response people and being dilatory in calling the feds.


cantdog

 

[Jagged]

The President said what he needed to which is a good thing. As for me though I want efforts to move forward in rebuilding and repair and reforms for the future. The President has never cared for opinion polls over his term in office but there needed to have one person to focus on.......even if just to blame. I am a supporter and hope he makes good on all that he plans to do....those on the Gulf coast have been through alot. They just care about their homes and families and where their next meal is coming from....we have to fix these problems they will decide who to blame then.

 

[cantdog]

The important thing always is to fix the problem, not the blame.