http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002341.htmlWe heard this on CNN (on satellite radio) last night while we were driving home and almost ran off the road. It was an exchange between anchor Aaron Brown and Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent, about the military seeking to explain it's slow response to Katrina:
MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn't move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.
And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.
And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn't really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.
BROWN: Yes, I mean, I'm glad you told us that. And they have every right to believe they believe and think the way they think. I mean, and I mean that. But you've got people who have been living as refugees. It is not hard to understand why our first heart beat goes in their direction. We'll worry about the bureaucrats later.
Amen. It's one thing to argue that it's too early to debate who or what is to blame for the human tragedy in New Orleans and Mississippi (although we don't agree). It's something else to blame the victims, as we see here and from FEMA chief David Brown, who said yesterday that the high death toll is "going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings."
Reprehensible.
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