Katrina, Again

Isn't it a good thing that nature's tempests aren't as rapaciously long-lived as the public relations variety?

The long-awaited-by-Bushophobes congressional Katrina report has come out, and it reads as if the Democrats were its sole authors. Hearteningly, however, in keeping with the Bush White House's new "pushback" policy, the Administration was having no part of being scapegoated for the failures of state and local officials in Louisiana:

Top White House and Homeland Security officials pushed back hard on Monday against criticism of the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina.

"I reject outright the suggestion that President Bush was anything less than fully involved," said White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he "unequivocally and strongly" rejected suggestions that his agency was preoccupied with terror threats, at the expense of preparing for natural disasters.

Does that last phrase strike you as sharply as it did me? "Preoccupied with terror threats at the expense of preparing for natural disasters"? Like that's an either/or proposition. And didn't basically the same opposition bunch try to scapegoat the Bush Administration for not being preoccupied with terror threats a couple of years ago in the public 9/11 commission hearings? Can't you just see them turning that phrase (back) around after another mass terrorist attack?

In this case, they had a little help - from a most treacherous source:

Both [Townsend and Chertoff] clearly aimed their criticism at comments last week by Michael Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Brown claimed he had issued repeated warnings to the White House and DHS, the day the hurricane slammed ashore, August 29, that New Orleans was seriously flooding.

On second thought, perhaps I'm being too harsh on "Brownie"; while he's trying to salvage his reputation at the Bushies' expense, they were the ones who disloyally heaved him overboard in the first place. A case of reaping what they sewed.

And in point of fact, the Bushophobes needed all the help they could get, because the aforementioned congressional report sports more holes than a doughnut factory (h/t Instapundit):

We've given the report an initial read and found it riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations. . . .

For now, though, here’s a quick overview of what seems to be the report’s most troubling shortfall: consistently blaming individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight.

For example, the report states:

"Fifty-six hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Katrina presented an extremely high probability threat that 75 percent of New Orleans would be flooded, tens of thousands of residents may be killed, hundreds of thousands trapped in flood waters up to 20 feet, hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures destroyed, a million people evacuated from their homes, and the greater New Orleans area would be rendered uninhabitable for several months or years."

This statistic is referred to often, and refers to computer modeling of a direct Category 5 hurricane landfall in New Orleans. However, it's also a distortion. According to the data the Committee itself examined, 56 hours prior to landfall, Katrina was a relatively weak Category 3 storm, heading west in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few hours, it began its turn north, but where the storm was going to make landfall along the Gulf Coast was any weatherman's bet (the average 48-hour margin of error is 160 miles). In fact, it was not until the next day, Saturday, that it became more of a certainty that the hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. Furthermore, hurricane forecasters and emergency managers tell PM that until about 24 hours before landfall, hurricanes are too unpredictable to warrant the sort of blanket evacuation orders the report describes.

And according to transcripts obtained by Popular Mechanics of the Sunday, August 28, videoconference between FEMA, DHS, Gulf State authorities, the National Weather Service and the White House, as late as Sunday—only 24 hours before landfall—National Hurricane Center storm tracks predicted: "There will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself." The death tolls listed in the congressional report presuppose: A) certainty that the storm would hit New Orleans directly, and B) certainty the storm would strengthen to a Category 4 or 5. Neither of these propositions was certain 56 hours prior to landfall. And, in fact, the hurricane was a Category 3 storm when it did hit.

The Committee report also criticizes the DHS and FEMA for not including the Department of Defense in their pre-storm and immediate post-storm planning. However, the same August 28 transcript shows that DoD was included from the beginning. In reality, despite organizational shortcomings, the rescue spearheaded by the National Guard and the Coast Guard turned out to be the largest and fastest in U.S. history, mobilizing nearly 100,000 responders within three days of the hurricane’s landfall. While each of the 1,072 deaths in Louisiana was a tragedy, the worst-case scenario death toll would have been 60,000. [emphasis added]

To make a long story short, and as we repeatedly asserted at the time, it was the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana that f'd up the Katrina aftermath, not the feds, who weren't perfect but nevertheless did a damn good job, particularly under such extreme circumstances. Circumstances to which the Administration's "critics" contributed by their reflexive attacks in lieu of trying to be part of the solution.

Unless libs believe that the President of the United States possesses the power to control the weather (a possibility since I recall some of his "critics" accusing Bush of "sending" Katrina to New Orleans to "commit genocide" against the Big Easy's black population), or expect him to stand on the Gulf Coast beach and pray the storm away like they once ridiculed Pat Robertson for doing, they would be performing everybody a huge favor by just shutting the hell up.

The reputations they end up saving (it's way too late for that, but work with me here...) may end up being their own.