its not the fact he didnt land and walk around and hold hands with black people for photo opts…
Its the fact we knew about this storm for days before it hit… he shouldve had national gaurd mobolized and ready to storm into that city the minute the hurricane passed… but he didnt…
What does he say later in a press statement… We are rushing our gaurd down there now, it takes time to mobolize them all… Um, hello!? we knew about this for days… four days after the fact the national gaurd is just getting there??
If he started mobolizing in the three days PRIOR the gaurd coulda been there the next day or day of the hurricane… Bush is just an idiot… plain and simple.
The thing is with setting up a relief effort, you simply just can’t throw people into the disaster area and expect them to be able to fix the problem. You also have to take into consideration that this area is in fact very dangerous and you will be sacrificing more lives by not having a set plan before dropping in and trying to help. It’s not like the Tsunami where we drop off the food and don’t have to worry about how the people get it. We have to be the ones to organize and keep control of the area. We just can’t drop off supplies and say “ok every man for themselves” cause that’s just going to cause more problems when people fight over supplies. Everybody seems to think that the situation is easy to solve when in fact there is a lot more to it. If it’s not organized, you can’t expect it to go smoothly especially with minimal authority present. A military man standing with a gun doesn’t exactly seem like a good thing to people who need help and I guarantee that the same people who were shooting at the help already, would see these people as a clear target. The New Orleans Police aren’t doing anything, but you can’t really bring in US troops and declare martial law either or we are going to have another civil war…It’s a shitty situation any way you look at it. I think we might have been able to be more prepared, but really how much more prepared could we have been? It’s not like weather prediction is a perfect science…sometimes these storms move in unpredicted directions and sometimes they die out before hitting land. It’s a crap shoot. There was no gaurentee that it was going to hit New Orleans. I don’t even think it hit them head on. If Katrina hit some place else, cleanup would have been way easier instead of dealing with a city that is 80% underwater. Why anybody would want to live in a city that is below sea level, surrounded by a river and ocean and is known to be sinking even deeper each year is beyond me. This disaster was bound to happen someday and its a terrible thing, but I honestly dont’ think there was much that we could have done about it unless we kicked people out of that area forever.
I’d have to agree on the mobilization part, terrible planning there. But what more could you expect now a days, especially when you have someone “running” things with his thumb so far up his ass. :-/
And the :bloated: look on Myer’s face was like wow!
“Last year a category five hurricane hit the impoverished nation of Cuba with 160 M.P.H. winds. Yet the Cubans, for all of their faults, were able to evacuate 1.5 million people to high ground. Despite losing over 20,000 homes to winds and floodwaters, the casualty rate in Cuba was negligible. In New Orleans, by contrast, we left the poor, elderly, infirmed and otherwise vulnerable behind to die.”
If Cuba could do it why couldn’t we?
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) used to have a plan for responding to a hurricane hitting New Orleans. It involved activating a hospital ship at the first sign of a storm and following the storm up into the gulf – knowing it would make landfall somewhere. And the hospital would be on the scene 24 hours later. The National Guard, mobilized at the first hint of a storm, was supposed to be on the scene within hours, and so on. But the Bush administration folded FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, replacing the director of FEMA with a political appointee with no emergency response experience. He was fired from his previous position managing horse shows as head of the International Arabian Horse Association.”
Yay for good leadership and smart decision making.
I dont know man, people just seem to grasp at anything they can to put blame on people (especially ppl they dont like). If people would of evacuated the city like they were told in the first place, instead of “hunkering down”, alot of this crap would of been avoided all together
How were the poor and elderly supposed to leave if they had no means of transportation? They were told to go to the Superdome if they had no way of getting out. Katrina wasn’t even that bad causing only superficial damage. The old underfunded levees were the problem. You are just using the Republican talking point of blaming the poor, elderly and infirmed.
"Over one quarter of New Orleans’ population struggled to live below the federal poverty line in some of the most substandard housing in the country. Over 100,000 of them lacked access to automobiles – giving New Orleans the lowest auto ownership rate in the U.S. – even lower than mass transit endowed New York City.
When the evacuation order came, public busses were running on a Sunday schedule. The few that were running ceased operating by late afternoon as the system was shut down – no doubt with the bus drivers themselves heading to dry ground. School buses that could have been employed in the evacuation effort were left locked up in mostly low-lying parking lots – eventually submerging in the flood."
Rush is reading the official New Orleans emergency plan.
It sounds like the mayor of N.O. did not do anything he was supposed to do.
He could have save thousands of people.
I would think the president has more command over a state governor. As a leader maybe he should’ve at least suggested making better decisions to the governor… I would relate this situation to throwing a 3 year old into the pool without floaties on… “Oops yur drowning?? Shoulda asked for the floaties.”
hmm… that doesn’t seem to be bush’s policy in Iraq
Actually the state has the power.
Bush made many strong suggestions since Sunday and the local officials sat around with their thumbs up their asses.
The Pres does not declare emergencies, the locals have to do that.
City and state officials fucked up period
Well, we’re not talking about Iraq are we? That’s a different situation and you don’t treat all situations the same. Enter domestic and foriegn policy…
I think it’s very sad that a lot of people are making this horrible event into a political debate.
I think you ignored a lot of key points that i brought up.
A lot of people hate president Bush and i’m fine with that, but I’m not about to blame a natural disaster on him.
If more people actually put more effort into helping then finger pointing we would be a lot better off.
and i think that other example that you used was a terrible comparison. By using your “situation” it’s almost like you are blaming bush for making people live in that Water hole.(throwing the child into the pool). and he didn’t create the hurricane (pool). He’s not Don Paul, who can’t even predict where the storms are going to go and the people in charge in New Orleans are useless. I think there are a lot of other people you should be bitching about instead of the president. I know you hate him, but damn man think things through a little. We’re all upset over what happend, but the only way to fix things are to work on the problem.