NY Daily News: Shame of a Nation

[brooklynite]

In rode the troops, with plenty of food and water and medicines, and for sure with firepower enough to make fast work of any armed-thug types who might choose to feel trigger-happy, and conditions last night in New Orleans were well on the way to being measurably improved. Thousands of storm victims were getting themselves evacuated from the hellhole Superdome. Thousands more were safe in shelters in Houston and Dallas and San Antonio and elsewhere. The airport was open, and medevac planes were regularly lifting out the desperately ill.

Sadly - maddeningly, and indeed infuriatingly - help arrived not soon enough to spare the wretched souls of New Orleans from miseries and horrors they were forced to endure for entirely too long. President Bush himself snapped that the federal government's disaster-response performance had been "not acceptable."

But yesterday, visiting the stricken Gulf Coast before signing off on more than $10 billion in preliminary aid, he made a point of publicly thanking Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and Federal Emergency Management Agency boss Michael Brown for their tireless work. What tireless work? The weasel Brown said the anticipated high death toll is "going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings" and get out. Such compassion. Such stupidity. Many of them had no means of escape. And so they stayed behind, trapped in a doomed city as the lights went out and the poisoned waters rose. As for Chertoff, if this is the best his department can do, the homeland is not very secure at all.

It is absolutely outrageous that the United States of America could not send help to tens of thousands of forlorn, frightened, sick and hungry human beings at least 24 hours before it did, arguably longer than that. Who is specifically at fault for what is nothing less than a national scandal will be a matter for the postmortems.

It will never be known exactly what a day could have meant to so many unfortunates whose lives came to an end in those hopelessly tortured hours - on scorching roadsides, for lack of a swallow of water; in sweltering hospital beds, for lack of insulin. But what is already more than clear is that the nation's disaster-preparedness mechanisms do not appear to be in the hands of officials who know how to run them.

[rfranklin]

1. Why are they so scared of putting the responsibility where it belongs?

Chertof and Brown are Bush political appointees. They are incompetents appointed by an incompetent.

[indepat]

2. Yeah, but their politics and ideology are right, so the litmus test was

met.

[donco6]

3. Message: We Are Not Safe.

Thousands died needlessly due to the incompetence of FEMA, Homeland Security and the White House. Despite their feeble attempts to blame the victims and the local governments, the buck stops with them. They've all gotta GO!