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Comments: Anger Rises

I don't know about the "America hating" right wing crowd, but I'm with the right-wingers on NRO/Instapundit/etc when they say that it is fundamentally a breakdown in management by the local/state governments. Surely you've seen the photo by now of the buses (seating capacity: 15000 or so, and that's just one trip) sitting unused, now submerged in water, in the city of New Orleans.

Posted by drzachary at September 4, 2005 03:55 PM

That photo is nonsense.

For that photo to have any meaning as far as the local government goes, you would have to prove that the Mayor (assumably it would have been his responsibility) knew the entire city would be flooded to that extent in this instance.

There are two complaints by the left. One is that the levees should have been reinforced when the request was made. A preventative measure.

But failing that, it's unreasonable to expect the Mayor to bus thousands of people out of the city if they have nowhere to go. At least, it's unreasonable unless you use the benefit of hindsight.

The second complaint is that, since the levee broke, the federal government has been lackadaisical in its response to arguably the biggest homeland tragedy in our nation's history. It took days to get them off of vacation (in Cheney's case nearly a week). Condi was shoe shopping. Bush was playing country music rockstar. The response simply hasn't been focused, organized, or of sufficient magnitude. Certainly some blame lies with local officials. But local officials simply cannot expect to deal with a tragedy of this magnitude. They didn't on 9/11. They didn't with Hurricane Andrew. They didn't with San Francisco's earthquake. They didn't with Chicago's fire.

Only goes to show that you can slash the federal government all you want, but it will only make it more unprepared for when we really need it.

Posted by PragmAddict at September 6, 2005 04:29 PM

Uh, you can download the New Orleans evacuation plan in a PDF. It calls for the evacuation by bus of those who cannot get out on their own. The plan that was agreed upon was not executed. The evacuation was not even called for until less than 24 hours before landfall. That's a failure of the local government.

Surely the feds bear a small amount of responsibility for the sluggish response, but the left is going nuts with the Bush blame. It will come back to haunt us.

The local (or state government) if you will, has to be able to handle a tragedy of that magnitude for a few days. That's the point of the disaster plans. I would argue that first response to disaster is the base reason for local government's existence. Or should we just do away with local and state governments and have Bush act unilaterally, without state permission or authorization, to deploy the NG within states?

Posted by drzachary at September 7, 2005 09:28 AM

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