Monthly Archives: September 2005

On Meet the Press – Aaron Brousard, President of Jackson Parrish, Louisiana.
At the end of the video, when he starts talking about city employees who have worked hard to repair the levees and provide emergency services, he begins talking about the man who is keeping the building he’s in running. The man’s mother was in an nursing home and was desparate for help. She called Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights to ask for help, and Friday night she drowned in her nursing home.
“They’ve had press conferences; I’m sick of press conferences. For God’s sake, shut up and send us somebody!”
“Bureaucracy has committed murder in the Greater New Orleans area.”

from U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., yesterday afternoon:

“I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims – far more efficiently than buses – FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.
“But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast – black and white, rich and poor, young and old – deserve far better from their national government.

It’s not about politics, it’s about the fact that people are dying because you’re a dumbfuck. From the New York Times on the “politics.”

White House officials, already sensitive that Mr. Bush is suffering the lowest approval ratings of his presidency and under pressure to manage a catastrophe of what they called biblical proportions, reacted with frustration.
“Seventy-two hours into this, to be openly posturing about this, to be attacking the president, is not only despicable and wrong, it’s not politically smart,” said one White House official who asked not to be named because he did not want to be seen as talking about the crisis in political terms. “Normal people at home understand that it’s not the president who’s responsible for this, it’s the hurricane. This will get better, hour by hour and day by day.”

Not politically smart? Nice warning, asshole. It’s not the hurricane. It’s the totally lack of help from the federal government AFTER the hurricane. People aren’t dying because of the storm; they survived the storm. They’re dying because they’re not receiving disaster aid, and that is Bush’s fault.
And Americablog has a really good point — If we can find who to blame, we can fix the problem of why people aren’t getting aid by doing it differently. It’s not about trashing people, it’s about getting useless people to do something different, or at least get the hell out of the way.

Americablog notes that Fox News is pushing a new talking point, in the quote by FEMA director Michael Brown:

Brown of FEMA: We work closely with the state government. The federal government didn not just come in here and tell the state governor how or what to do. We came in here and said, ‘What do you want us to do? We will help you.’ We are now taking it upon ourselves to do what we think needs to be done. And we will continue to do that.
Translation: LA’s Democratic governnor screwed things up royally and now we’re cleaning up her mess and taking charge.