The Elephant in New Orleans

As I stated in my blog description, one of the things that I hope to accomplish is to review current events and what is being said, and then try to take it to a higher level. In the case of the disaster that is New Orleans, I see this monstrous elephant in the room that nobody (that I have seen) is talking about. I am not surprised ... since the lefties are reaching new levels of lunacy trying to blame this all on Bush.

To me, the question is ... who the heck is running that city and state, and exactly why did they have (what seems to be) zero preparation for before, during and after a hurricane? Think about it, do you really think that the preparations and execution for this should be done at the federal level??? Rudy Guliani seemed to be more on top of 9-11 (which nobody knew was coming) than Nagin does for Katrina with 4 or more days warning (this completely ignores the near miss by Hurrican Ivan, which Nagin seemed to ignore as well ... see below).

Do not get me wrong, I know the devastation is far worse than anybody wanted to imagine ... I certainly do not expect flawless performance. However, the response so far indicates that these people do not have any clue as to what to even try. The police had no clue what to do, authorities obviously were not setup at the Superdome to handle any aspect of the crowds, nor did they anticipate that they might need a contingency to evacuate the dome, the national guard was not staged or prepared (by the way, seems few people seem to know this is a state level thing), and nearby states' guard were not setup (again, something the governor should have worked out), etc. The feds might play a role in execution, but a plan, ANY PLAN, should have been in place and ready long before Katrina was a tropical itch, don't ya think?

This whole mess is amazing in light of the fact that New Orleans recently had that near miss with Cat 3 Ivan last year ... back then they were talking about how easily a strong storm could destroy the whole city by knocking out the levies (Ivan bounced up to Cat 5 about 3 or more times in his life). Now, would you guess at that point that somebody, somewhere might begin to formulate a plan for what to do if a big one ever did hit? In light of the fact that EVERYBODY who knows anything about hurricanes said these things were coming this year, fast and furious; having absolutely no plan at all just seems derelict.

One other thing ... the storm was NOT a direct impact, and the levies did not give out until a few hours after the worst of the storm was gone ... so this did not play out as bad as it could have. Yet we are three days past and there is absolutely nothing resembling leadership at the local or state level. Even if the feds could throw a million guys in there, it would accomplish nothing until there is somebody on the ground to direct the situation, and so far we have seen total incompetence at the local/state level. In 9-11, the leaders rose to the occasion and performed flawlessly ... exactly the opposite of what is happening in Lousiana.

Now, in terms of the media response ... nobody is coming within a thousand miles of talking about what seems to be the pure incompetence of the mayor and governer, and of course I should note that they are both democrats. Instead, the entire force of blame is being tossed at George W. Bush, who (liberals would have you believe) should have stood with his daughters on the beaches of Mississippi and huffed and puffed the huricane to reverse course back out to sea (preferably avoiding Cuba in the process).