Category: Old Dish

That’s the Bush strategy. And the local authorities did indeed fail badly with respect to mobilizing resources to evacuate the poorer parts of the threatened city while they still could. No criticism I’ve made of the federal response should be inferred to say I think the locals performed well. They didn’t. But a disaster of this magnitude is obviously beyond the scope of a single mayor or governor. And it became clear very quickly to anyone with a modem or a TV that a disaster was happening. The federal officials are on record denying the calamity even as CNN and Fox were broadcasting it. Chertoff is still denying that anyone foresaw such a scenario even as Brown has said they were on the verge of a plan for dealing with it; and anyone with Google can see umpteen predictions, warnings and analysis of just such a scenario for years. The president told Diane Sawyer that no one anticipated the breach of the levees – about the dumbest thing he has said since the “Mission Accomplished” fiasco. Today, the WaPo, in the piece cited above, has this: “As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.” Hmm. As a reader pointed out, the record shows she did such a thing the previous Saturday. And that Bush had declared one the next day. When the administration’s excuses are this patently thin – and contradict each other – you know that this time, even Karl Rove cannot blame someone else.

Here’s a great blog post about the blithering idiot, Michael “heck of a job” Brown, hired with no credentials to run a critical agency at a time of national peril. I guess some of us pundits bear the blame. We should have known that someone who had been fired for being unable to run an Arabian Horse Association had the job of responding to a national disaster in the war on terror. He was hired because a Bush crony, Joe Allbaugh (also hired because he was a major Bush fundraiser) liked him. The good ol’ boy network at its most brazen. If the president wants to recover even a little from what has happened to his reputation, he has to fire Brown. Now. That’s the test of whether he gets it. Not his furrowed brow press conferences. Not his spin. Not the desperate attempts by Republican partisans – once again! – to blame someone else down the chain of command. I don’t normally agree with Michelle Malkin, but she’s right on this one. I think we need the same blog pressure to get rid of Brown that we had with Trent Lott and Howell Raines. This is not a liberal-conservative issue. This is a competence issue. It’s a question of national security. Fire Brown now.

“Neoconservatism has always been an ideology dependent on the global projection of national power. What gave it its strength was that after 9/11, Americans were so angry at the assault that they wanted to go overseas and attack those responsible – thus was ‘The War on Terror’ born.
They were lied into thinking that the removal of Saddam Hussein would make the world a safer and more prosperous place. Clearly it hasn’t; if anything, you’re more at risk riding the Tube now than you were three years ago.
The lie has been shown not to stand up; and when that has not only failed but has been shown to have failed, what can an ideology based on the global projection of national power do when confronted with a crisis which shows it to be nationally powerless?
Nothing. The collapsed levees of New Orleans will have consequences for neoconservatism just as long and deep as the collapse of the Wall in East Berlin had on Soviet Communism; for when hacks and fulminators like John Podhoretz are openly criticizing the president, the Great Leader, the ideology is on the way out. And hopefully all of those who urged the ideology on, myself included, will have a long time to consider the error of our ways.’ – Martin Kelly, G-Gnome. I’m not as gloomy as Kelly is about the state of neoconservatism, but his little blog-essay is stimulating stuff.

“I spent my graduate school career studying hurricanes. At each conference I went to, starting in the late 90s, the panels talked about their thoughts on the most vulnerable city in America, on their nightmare scenario: it was always New Orleans. Sea water would inundate the city, overtaking thousands of people; toxic waste from Louisiana’s chemical industry would further foul the area, rendering it uninhabitable. It was not idle speculation; the strength of storm required to accomplish this is climatologically possible for much of the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. Do not be tricked into parsing overtopped vs. undermined levees – scientists have long known that ‘filling the bowl’ in New Orleans was likely with a strong hurricane. Even if preventing this was not possible, FEMA and other agencies should have had concrete plans on how to deal with this eventuality. They’ve been shown to have none that could get aid to the city faster than nearly 4 days after the storm ended.
I spent a few weeks at the end of my time in grad school working at one of NOAA’s Hurricane Research labs in Miami. Cabinets full of data gathered on reconnaissance flights sat, unexamined. There was no funding to have anyone go through the reams of data, gathered at high cost and risk to the scientists aboard the flights, even to be able to put it on the web for academic researchers to use. Several staff members told me that they’d love to be able to hire someone like me, but their funding was restricted because of the war in Iraq, and they would not be able to add any positions for several years, at least.”
I’m reminded of Ronald Reagan’s famous quip – and I paraphrase. Didn’t he say that the most frightening words in the English language were: “We’re the federal government and we’ve come to help.”

CNN – which has just had one of its finest hours – puts together a string of quotes from officials compared with what their own reporting showed at the time. The gap between Bush rhetoric and reality in America is stunning. Now transpose that to Iraq. And worry.

A SENATE VOTES: Missed in the Katrina coverage was an historic event: the California Senate passed a bill allowing gay couples the right to marry. The bill faces an uncertain future. But it does change the dynamics. For the first time, unprompted by a court, a state legislature has passed a marriage bill. The entire argument about judicial tyranny may soon disappear – and may evaporate if the Massachusetts legislature shelves a constitutional amendment later this month. Then we can have a substantive debate about marriage rights, and states’ rights. Conservatives whose only objection to equal marriage rights was the way in which they were being imposed will have to think again.

The feckless FEMA head was basically fired from his previous job. A simple test of whether this administration has any understanding of even basic accountability will be if he remains in his job once this disaster is over. And of course, Bush will never, can never, fire anyone for incompetence.

“What is highly surprising now is the disintegration of the administration’s mask of competence and confidence, as New Orleans sinks day by day into squalor and savagery, a shocking panorama of unrelieved human suffering.” – Camille Paglia, today. Surprising? Well, I guess their mask has now slipped. I should clarify my comments of the last couple days. None of this is good news. The death toll because of the administration’s incompetence is a human tragedy. At a deeper level, as a believer that we have to win in Iraq, I worry that the public’s trust in anything this administration says about reality may soon disappear altogether. The will we need to persevere in Iraq depends to some extent on trust in the administration. The trust, already battered, may now collapse. This calamity happened in a region where support for the president was relatively strong. It benefits none of us – least of all the beleaguered Iraqis – that this has happened and is still happening. But we know now at least how the citizens of Iraq must feel – besieged, bereft of sufficient security, and reassured by smug Bush administration pabulum. They’re on their own, just as surely as the remaining citizens of New Orleans were left to fend for themselves. But, hey, stuff happens, doesn’t it?

THE ANTI-REAGAN: Jon Rauch discovers the true radicalism of Rick Santorum: an attack on the entire Reaganite belief in individual freedom.

Jack Shafer’s on a roll.

“I’ve worked closely with Corps personnel for 6 years in various scientific and regulatory capacities on wetlands issues. While the Corps is often maligned by environmentalists, I will be the first to defend the professionalism, commitment and skill of their regulatory field staff.
The Corps, however, is Army – the institutional culture is one of top-down control and damn-the-torpedoes, and a deeply-ingrained instinct against criticising the chain of command. In an email yesterday that eventually ended up on Wonkette, I predicted that they would be good soldiers and insulate Bush against charges that the levees weren’t finished, and indeed I woke up to Al Naomi saying just that on NPR. And General Strock from HQ had to be brought in to do the real damage control: “I don’t see that the level of funding was really a contributing factor in this case,” said Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the corps. “Had this project been fully complete, it is my opinion that based on the intensity of this storm that the flooding of the business district and the French Quarter would have still taken place.” (from Chi Trib).
But there are really TWO questions that must be answered:

1) Was the levee complete and at design spec?

2) Would a design-spec levee have withstood Katrina?

1) The truth is that short of a whistleblower, we may never know the condition of that levee on 8/29. My source on its inadequate condition isn’t solid enough. But I know the following things:

a) You don’t finish levees and walk away. They need regular maintenance – even when you haven’t built them on dewatered organic soils that settle every year.

b) A District that had just taken a one-year budget cut of $71 million will have had to make some very hard choices about whether maintenance on this particular levee fell (in Corps parlance) “above the line – priority” or “below the line – optional”. Their SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) guidance might tell us, but somebody needs to get a FOIA cookin’ on this right now.

c) The question of levee adequacy breaks down at least into “was it at spec height?” [yes!] and “was it structurally sound to spec?” [oops!]. Because of the nature of the levee failure (not overtopped, but burst), watch for Corp HQ to focus on the first question (which pins the deaths on nature), and ignore the second (which might pin the deaths on budget decisions).

2) Over the coming days, the Corps’ message will be this: “Katrina was greater than the design storm for this levee.” This is at least an open question – purportedly the levees were designed to withstand a direct hit from a Category 3 hurricane. Katrina was a Category 4 at landfall, presenting her weak side to the levees at a distance of some 40-50 miles. The question appears debatable on its technical merits, and Strock’s facile answer is far too politically expedient a conclusion to take at face value from Corps HQ. I have seen them fall on their sword for Presidents before, and the need has never been greater.

To sum up: Gen. Strock is asking us to accept that the Army Corps could maintain the structural integrity of every last mile of levee built on subsiding soils in a District that had taken a $71 million budget cut in one year. AND that they would admit it if they hadn’t, when the reputation of the President is at stake. All my experience rejects both propositions.”

“‘The good news is – and it’s hard for some to see it now – that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house – there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.’ (Laughter).” – president George W. Bush, today. Just think of that quote for a minute; and the laughter that followed. The poor and the black are dying, dead, drowned and desperate in New Orleans and elsewhere. But the president manages to talk about the future “fantastic” porch of a rich, powerful white man who only recently resigned his position because he regretted the failure of Strom Thurmond to hold back the tide of racial desegregation.