More Katrina Common Sense

....from Cap'n Ed:

When the storm reached Cat-5 status in the Gulf of Mexico, what did George Bush do? He declared the entire Gulf coast an emergency area and mobilized FEMA. Until it actually made landfall, however, he could not pinpoint the assets. Even at the last moment, the brunt of the storm hit Gulfport, not New Orleans. The levee failure came later, on Tuesday, and until then the damage to New Orleans was major, not catastrophic.

Even so, the existence of the storm off the coast of Louisiana should have prompted governments on all levels to act. What happened? The city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana [both run by Democrats] asked people to evacuate, but made no preparations to assist people in that endeavor. By Friday the outbound roads clogged with people in cars looking to escape, which all did. However, an entire fleet of school buses - hundreds of them - sat in their parking lots, gathering dust. Until George Bush called Governor Blanco personally and pleaded with her to make the evacuation order mandatory on Saturday, neither Mayor Nagin nor Blanco told people they had to leave. Apparently, that order only went out over the TV and radio from their press conference; no attempt was made to direct people out of their homes and onto the road.

After the levees broke on Tuesday, the situation broke down rapidly, a drearily predictable result. The two main refugee centers, the official one at the Superdome and the ad-hoc site at the Convention Center, should have been evacuated at that point. However, even two days after landfall, New Orleans had not moved its buses to high ground to keep them ready for use in case the levees broke. Lousiana's governor had not called out her National Guard units, only 25% of which have deployed to Iraq. With I-10 from the east completely unusable for vehicular traffic and the New Orleans PD completely absorbed by search-and-rescue functions, looting ran wild and order completely broke down. Nagin only ordered the PD to take on looting as a high priority on Thursday.

What did George Bush do? He had a wide area of devastation to manage. Mississippi has also sustained catastrophic damage, with entire towns destroyed, flooded, and unable to fend for themselves. He does not have the authority to call out anyone's National Guard until he federalizes the units, a move usually reserved for use when governors prove recalcitrant in mobilization. Yet within three days of the levee burst and the drowning of New Orleans, Bush had 40,000 troops entering the city to take over the management from Nagin and Blanco, delivering the aid that had waited for lines of communication to get established and the order that the NOPD and Louisiana could not maintain.

We work within a federal system, where cities and states control the allocation of resources used within their borders. We do this because we recognize that, for the most part, federalism works. Local decisions about resource allocation usually create better results than top-down bureaucratic management. The main requirement for that to work is local leadership. Blaming George Bush because he delivered results within three days of the major catastrophic event while following these rules is as silly as blaming Congress for taking five days to pass an aid bill.

The main failure in New Orleans came when the local and state governments refused to recognize that the storm had a high chance to cause catastrophic damage and use its assets to get the poor and infirm out of its way. They had plenty of resources (in vehicles) with which to do that, but left them right where the floods would destroy them. All the rest of the damage would have been mere property destruction, difficult to rebuild but nonetheless easier to accept than the unbelievable hardship we've seen this week. [emphases mine]

In short, this natural disaster was exacerbated not by any "failure" or perfidy of George W. Bush, but from the corrupt incompetence of the "out of her league" Governor Blanco and the profane, finger-pointing Mayor Nagin, who sat on their fat asses while New Orleans drowned waiting for the feds to do their jobs for them.

There's a good reason why Republicans are sometimes referred to as the "adult" party and the Dems are, well, not. The latter's despicable tantrum of the past few days is fresh, day-glo proof of it.