More Foulness From Louisiana's Finest

Gosh, but Mayor C. Ray Nagin is becoming a cartoon character, isn't he?

On Friday, he again denied the culpability that unquestionably belongs to him for failing to mobilize those now-famous school buses to help in the evactuation he dithered too long in ordering - and in the most vapid way humanly possible:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said Friday that it wasn't his fault city school buses weren't mobilized to facilitate the Hurricane Katrina evacuation he ordered.

Appearing on NBC's Dateline, Nagin was asked by host Stone Phillips: "What was mobilized? I mean were national guard troops in position. Were helicopters standing by? Were buses ready to take people away?"

"No. None of that," the Big Easy mayor replied.

"Why is that?" an incredulous Phillips asked.

Nagin replied: "I don't know. That is question for somebody else."

Please understand that NBC had Nagin on in order to portray him sympathetically. Instead they displayed for the entire nation to see the very corrupt liberalistic mentality that precipitated this disaster in the first place.

Oh, but le maire was just getting warmed up. Yesterday he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he's ready to run and join the race-baiters:

"The more I think about it, definitely race played into this,” he told the paper.

"How do you treat people that just want to walk across the bridge and get out, and they’re turned away, because you can’t come to a certain parish?" the embattled mayor complained. "How do resources get stacked up outside the city of New Orleans and they don’t make their way in? How do you not bring one piece of ice?

"If it’s race," said Nagin, "fine, let’s call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We can never let this happen again.

"Even if you hate black people and you are in a leadership position, this did not help anybody,” he added.

Well, I guess he's talking about himself, then. I mean, it's his city, after all. His responsibility.

And that, of course, is the rub. Race-baiting, not patriotism, is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and the fact that Nagin waited this long before resorting to it is a pretty clear indication that he sees the end of his political line coming over the horizon and closing fast.

Pity U.S. senators can't be gotten rid of quite that easily. Although it's not as though Mary Landrieu isn't giving it her best effort.

After threatening to physically attack President Bush last weekend, she tried to blame him for Mayor Nagin's bumbling failure to utilize his now-waterlogged school buses because....oh, read it for yourself:

Asked on Fox News Sunday why New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin failed to follow the city's evacuation plan and press the buses into service, Landrieu blamed Bush Administration cuts in mass transit funding.

That would be appallingly fatuous enough, if the Bush Administration had ever cut mass transit funding. This Administration never cuts any funding, and in four and a half years has yet to veto a single appropriations bill of any kind.

Despite her public refusal to put the post-Katrina blame where it belongs - on Louisiana officials - she implicitly took a swipe at Mayor Nagin by making pathetic excuses for him:

"Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane," she said. "And it's because this Administration and administrations before them do not understand the difficulties that mayors . . . face."

Which they can't possibly address on their own but only by becoming wards of the federal government. Uh-huh.

Yet, after having just gotten through effectively indicting Nagin's total lack of leadership, Landrieu turned around and tried to spin the blatant lie that his belated, Bush-inspired evacuation had been a complete success:

"Because the mayor evacuated the city, we had the best evacuation . . . of any evacuation I've seen. I'm 50 years old; I've never seen one any better," Landrieu told FNS.

That prompted FNS host Chris Wallace to remind: "But there were a hundred thousand people left in the city."

In other words, Landrieu hasn't just been asleep in the Senate for the past nine years.

Her bluff having been called, the Bayou Beeyatch retreated to her most vaccuous talking point:

Landrieu once again blamed the White House, saying:

"They did [have] a hundred thousand people left in the city because this federal government won't support cities to evacuate people, whether it's from earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. And that's the truth."

Mary Landrieu wouldn't know the truth if it bit her in her fat ass.

Floridians, however, do know something about coping with and planning for hurricanes. And their conclusion on New Orleans' disaster contingency planning is substantially less glowing (via CQ].

One thing Florida knows is hurricanes.

Florida emergency planners criticized and even rebuked their counterparts - or what passes for emergency planners - in those states for their handling of Hurricane Katrina. Governor Jeb Bush, the head of Florida AHCA and the head of Florida wildlife (which is responsible for all search and rescue) all said they made offers of aid to Mississippi and Louisiana the day before Katrina hit but were rebuffed. After the storm, they said they've had to not only help provide people to those states but also have had to develop search and rescue plans for them. "They were completely unprepared - as bad off as we were before Andrew," one Florida official said....

Louisiana also lacked an adequate plan to evacuate New Orleans, despite years of research that predicted a disaster equal to or worse than Katrina. Even after a disaster test run last year exposed weaknesses in evacuation and recovery, officials failed to come up with solutions....

But the most recent Louisiana emergency operations plan doesn't address how to evacuate in the case of flooding from storm surge, saying simply that "The Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area represents a difficult evacuation problem due to the large population and its unique layout."

The plan called for "school and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies" to supplement personal vehicles for people who were carless. But nobody in New Orleans or Baton Rouge bothered to commandeer them or even move them to higher ground until after Katrina hit and the levees broke. Indeed, Governor Blanco didn't even know about the buses to be able to push Nagin off the schnied until three days after they had submerged. It also appears, according to a New York Times story that somehow made it past the Bushophobic editorial filter, that, "Blanco didn't even know what the plan required, or even have any knowledge of the resources and responsibilities that the state government had."

In point of fact it was FEMA - FEMA - which had to arrange for buses to come from Houston over storm-damaged roads, which they pulled off in about thirty-six hours after the Nagin/Blanco bus fiasco became known.

Speaking of FEMA, Jack Kelly continues the unraveling of the bum rap hung on the federal response to the Katrina disaster (also via CQ):

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Florida after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three....

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

*More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

*The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

*Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

But enough with the inconvenient FACTS of the matter - let's get to the hell-dispensing, courtesy of blogger Moltenthought:

We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on Star Trek in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above.

Or, as Mr. Kelly wrote, "So they libel as a 'national disgrace' the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history."

In a sense, though, "they" have no choice. Libs pronounced an apocalypse before all the evidence was in because they were so slaveringly desperate to have a "scandal" that would finally stick to President Bush. The more apparent it becomes that their pronouncement was wildly wrong, the more furiously they have to spin it, because in their minds admitting their error and dropping their Bushophobic agitating is worse, far worse than keeping up the myth propogation and consequent self-burial.

So they'll say anything. No matter how disgusting, unconscionable, or slanderous.

As usual, Mark Steyn has the most inciteful and witty take on it:

[T]he left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. I thought the Australian imam who warned Muslims the other week to lay off the bananas because the Zionists are putting poison in them was pretty loopy. But is he really any more bananas than folks who think Bush is behind the hurricane? Bush is apparently no longer the citizen-president of a functioning republic, but a 21st century King Canute expected to go sit by the shore and repel the waters as they attempt to make landfall. Instead, he and Cheney hatched up the whole hurricane thing in the Halliburton research labs to distract attention from their right-wing Supreme Court nominee....

Gosh, I hope Mr. Steyn didn't scoop Senator Landrieu's next set of talking points....

UPDATE: If Mary Landrieu were a Republican, do you think we'd have to rely upon Rush Limbaugh and John Hinderaker to publicize this little detail about the "fetching" senator?

It's funny, though, how seldom these MSM interviewers ask her about the fact that her brother is the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana. Plus, of course, her father was the Mayor of New Orleans. Can anyone say "corrupt oligarchy"?

Put Hurricane Katrina during the '90s and make Landrieu a 'Pubbie and we'd never have heard the end of it.