It Wasn't The Feds Who "Murdered" Hurricane Victims

....It was the state of Louisiana and especially the "goddamn" mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

Cap'n Ed, in his inimitable. yeoman fashion, has the round-up.

*Katrina: Dry Run Taught New Orleans Nothing

Marc from Cranial Cavity notes that the issues of evacuation had come to light before in New Orleans, almost exactly a year ago, in the advance of Hurrican Ivan through the Gulf. This report demonstrates that the problem experienced this week in The Big Easy did not arise from ignorance or a failure of imagination, but directly from incompetence in the city administration and specifically by Mayor Ray Nagin....

*Katrina: Why Didn't Nagin Follow His Own Plan?

Mark Tapscott, one of the best crossover bloggers and a fierce researcher, turned up an interesting document yesterday: the New Orleans comprehensive hurricane disaster plan. The plan exists on line and has a high level of detail, and yet the Exempt Media has given no coverage of its contents. The most obvious reason is that it shows that New Orleans and the state of Louisiana didn't follow their own plan....[emphasis added]

Real leaders accept responsibility for their own failures. Hell, real leaders do everything in their power not to fail in the first place. And real leaders don't throw profane, finger-pointing temper tantrums after they fail and defame the very others who are trying to pull their fat asses on which they've been sitting out of the slings into which their incompetence thrust them.

Mayor Nagin should have kept that shell-shocked look on his face, his big yap shut, and gratefully accepted the "feds'" help. Because when the inevitable hearings, probes, and investigations commence, he is going to have more civilian blood on his hands than anybody else. And I, for one, will have no smidgen of the sympathy that I felt for him last week.

Finally, Morrissey provides us with a useful reminder - Katrina didn't just land on New Orleans:

The media has painted a distorted picture of the disaster almost from the beginning, and certainly after the levees broke on Lake Pontchartrain. The scope of 9/11 was a few city blocks in New York and Washington DC, and if one relied on the Exempt Media coverage for Katrina, the impression it gives is that the scope for Katrina's impact falls mainly on an entire city.

However, vast stretches of Mississippi have been devastated by Katrina, with towns like Biloxi and Gulfport almost completely destroyed. The area of destruction requiring attention comprises the same square mileage as England. Getting resources to all affected points within that zone simultaneously would take an unprecedented, Herculean effort that no one could have anticipated prior to landfall on Monday morning.

[B]y narrowing the scope of the disaster recovery facing the states and federal emergency responders, it makes it easier to blame them for a poor response, when in fact the turnaround time for assistance on Katrina has historically been one of the best for hurricane disasters.

As long as the nation only looks at New Orleans, they can wonder why more help hasn't flooded into the Big Easy. Once the camera angle widens to include all of Katrina's devastation, that question answers itself. [emphases added]

Or maybe it's just that since Mississippi and Alabama are run by Republicans, the Extreme Media figures they deserved what they got.

Sooner or later one of 'em will say it. Mark my words.

UPDATE: My God, it gets even better (from John Cole over at Balloon Juice via Everyman):

The WaPo has a big piece called in Katrina's Wake that you should read, complete with the following headline:

Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting: White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials

Within the piece is this:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush Administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The Administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request [!!!!!]. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly. [my frakking emphasis]

Can you believe this? Wait, let me see if I can get this all straight.

1) State and local officials in Louisiana had emergency contingency plans for major hurricane landfall on the books and did nothing with them when Katrina arrived, including a mandatory evacuation they didn't order until the President himself begged them to do so;

2) Mayor Nagin's own New Orleans cops not only failed to maintain public order in the aftermath of the storm and subsequent flooding but actually (at least in part) ran and joined the looters;

3) State and local officials in Louisiana and elsewhere (predominantly Democrats, the scattered remainder being craven, nutless Republicans) crapped on the Bush Administration for being "too slow" in responding despite its doing so in record time compared to previous natural disasters, as well as blasting the White House for failing to stop the looting and lawlessness, despite that being by definition a state/local responsibility;

4) And when the Administration moves to do what bitchers like Mayor Nagin have been petulantly demanding - federalize the relief effort - the !#$%ing slimewads block them because that would expose their own culpability in the disaster, and they wouldn't be able to scapegoat "the feds" any longer.

Let the record thusly show that for Democrats, destroying George W. Bush is more important even than the lives and survival of countless thousands of Americans in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama - and particularly the city whose physical state now matches the moral state in which its government has existed for many, many moons.