dRump’s idiocy, massive ego/rampant insecurity, lack of focus and general incompetence could have him officiate in the deaths of tens of millions of people via access to far too many nukes.
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I was in NO 3 days before Katrina.
I blame:
- The corrupt D mayor (Ray Nagin who is now in jail on corruption charges) and who whose evacuation plans were so poor that evacuated as little as possible and left thousands of school buses and National Guard trucks drown in parking lots rather than use them too evacuate.
- the D governor who refused to relinquish control of her National Guard to federal authority and did not call on neighbouring states to mobilise to help them until AFTER Katrina had hit.
- The homeowners who blocked the construction of canal closing structures along Lake Ponchartrain (Ugly structures that diminished the value of the view from their homes) but would have saved most of NO from flooding (that now exist because the homeowners changed their minds after Katrina).
Both Nagin and Kathleen Blanco failed in preparing NO for Katrina (even in using the means they had at their disposal) and both turned immediately to blaming Bush and everyone else they could to avoid answering any questions on why they were so badly prepared. How DARE the National guard of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi & Alabama state that because Missisipi & Alabama had requested their deployment before Katrina hit (and that Katrina hit harder east of NO) that they were unavailable to be redeployed to NO! What do you mean that by requesting the National guard from Missouri (the closest non-committed) AFTER Katrina had hit that the Guard would take 5 days for the personnel to leave their jobs, assemble, prepare their equipment and move down through downed bridges and flooded highways. DON’T THEY KNOW THAT PEOPLE ARE DYING IN NEW ORLEANS!!! IT’S BECAUSE GWB IS A RACIST!!!
Yeah, claiming that the reason NO suffered so much was because GWB was a racist bastard who didn’t care about black lives sold well on TV for Nagin & Blanco – for a while. For those that only watched CNN as Nagin & company were busily blaming others, yeah it was all GWB. For those who read the Times Picayune for the following years when harder questions were being asked, the answer changed.
Now ask yourself again: Could Obama have truly reconciled with GWB if what Nagin & Blanco & others were selling in order to avoid their own responsibility were true? Is Obama that dumb?
No, clearly, but you’ve continued to let that false criticism color your view of him.
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Highly unlikely. I mean, there’s no button he presses. He has to tell people to launch. And those people are unlikely to comply. Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov gives me hope that, push comes to shove, the people responsible are far, far, far better than that.
Starting a war of choice, however, is a different matter. The US has pretty consistently been doing that since the fifties. What’s one more, eh? (Too much. That’s what one more is.)
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“A 5-day response time for the National Guard to get to New Orleans was the best that could be expected under the circumstances” rings pretty hollow when both Mexico and Cuba were able to offer aid almost immediately. (Bush turned down Cuba’s offer and the aid brought by the Mexican military remains one of the most under-reported stories of 2006.)
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Anyone else notice that the headline can be parsed to suggest something rather different from its intent?
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The problem I have with the Katrina criticism is this, like 1001 other things presidents are blamed and praised for, really has nothing to do with them. It isn’t their job.
Katrina was the worst flooding in that area in modern history, and never with that many people involved. There was failure to properly mobilize at the city and state level (which should be where you get your prep work and initial help from - closest to the situation) and later at the federal level. It seems to me that everyone who is in place to handle such situations should already be doing their jobs to get things done. Multiple failures is what lead to the break down.
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Hang on, how did giving everybody’s money to the fraudulent thieving scum who caused the crash help…?
Obama was fucking great at making all the right noises, but the dude was no less of a neoliberal mass-murdering scumbag.
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As in making it policy that nukes can be used in retaliation for a cyberattack. The generals can easily talk the orange bastard into nuking someone over this kind of action.
I can tell you got a thing that GW catching shrapnel for things that happened during his term as unfair but my point was Obama likely has made a concession in putting aside differences with GW for appearance sake while you are still asking me if he could be sincere. My statement would imply I do not think that so asking me if he could have done so is just ignoring my point.
As for Katrina it was more that he had appointed a campaign supporter as the FEMA director instead of someone with appropriate credentials, which was somewhat typical as GW was keen to fill any and every federal position he could with loyalists and that was one time it bit him in the ass. I guess I don’t know if when a hurricane is about to destroy a city if it’s more on the locally elected mayor than the Federal Emergency Management Agency director to take the lead but maybe your right and it’s all the D’s fault. As for the National Guard’s part I seem to recall a foreign war going on involving most of our NATIONAL (ie. to protect the Nation) Guard being deployed in Iraq since military enrollment was way down due to few wanting to enlist at that time. I maybe could blame Bush for that too a bit I think.
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You would think that sounds hollow, but then you also probably think that the deployment of a dozen or even a few dozen rapid response members without much equipment is the same as the 10000 men with equipment that the army deployed to Louisiana & Mississippi for Katrina. Secondly, ask yourself how any significant help was going to make it into NO when the airport was shut down, all roads were in need of heavy equipment to clear them and helicopters were already oversubscribed with urgent tasks already. (The answer is that it was the NG that mobilised 3 states away AFTER Katrina that cleared the highways.)
You do recall that I mentioned that Nagin & Blanco were woefully unprepared except to blame everyone else? Counting on small rapid response teams to solve problems they are too small to realistically engage & not using the means at their disposal to evacuate before Katrina instead of attempting to mobilize afterwards is in large part why Nagin & Blanco were far more at fault than GWB.
Imagine for a moment that a major US city was hit by a surprise military invasion instead of a hurricane.
Is there ANYONE who would still defend a five-day response time from the National Guard?
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“Simpleton.”
Glad you were able to restrain yourself from calling him a retard, @doctorow.
It better be the main, active military showing up at first.
The National Guard doesn’t typically have a lot of people just sitting around. It’s the reserves. According to wiki, 40% of LAs were already overseas. The Governor sent a request for more, and other states even offered to send troops, but had to wait for bureaucratic approval from the National Guard Bureau and there was a delay in sending for that help.
A comedy of errors.
Who bears the responsibility for such a large portion of the National Guard being otherwise occupied overseas in 2006 if not George W. Bush?
Multiplied by the fact that the guy in charge of FEMA was a Bush crony who was given the job despite a complete lack of relevant experience.
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Yeah, that’s part of it, but that is an indirect consequence.
That makes a great scapegoat, but no org should be so reliant on one person to not be able to function. I am sure where you work, your department head or boss could disappear for a month and the people you work with could still continue to function. FEMA was unprepared on multiple levels for this. They still aren’t doing a great job, from what I understand. I mean, have they even used those mountains of coffins spotted during the Obama era? Did they open ONE death camp?
Certainly your points show some GWB had some effect indirectly on the situation, but many more had a more direct effect. And it wasn’t for the reasons Kanye so eloquently brought up.
Again, I think this is another example where the president gets way too much blame or credit.
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Expect the the Democrats to move right. There will be no talk of universal health care, immigration reform, LGBT rights, or even pulling down of racist confederate symbols in 2018. The fact is Nixon was left of Obama, and the non-majority party will follow the perceived “majority”, or suffer humiliation. The single hope of the “left” is the arrival of a charismatic leader (like Obama, Reagan, Kennedy, and ~wincing~ El Trumpo). If you want to mobilize the “did not vote crowd” it takes personality. BTW it is not going to be Bernie either…
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A surprise attack on the U.S would be met by regular forces who are active all the time and have the mission to defend the U.S. (and to spearhead U.S forces on the attack).
The only people who would be surprised that the National Guard would take days are those like you who have no idea what the US National guard is, what their missions are when they are/are not on duty and what their personnel do when not on duty. It explains in large part why you have unrealistic expectations. Here is a quick resumé so that you will not be quite so ignorant in the future.
Both the Reserve forces and the National guard are people who are civilians >90% of the time with regular jobs. For a weekend a month and a few weeks a year they return to active service. Most of the people in the reserves & the NG are ex regular service personnel (which explains where they got their military training). One major difference between the reserves and the National Guard is who is the supreme commander: POTUS for the reserves & the governor of the state for the National Guards.
Reserve forces generally serve as back up troops to the active duty forces. National Guards forces generally have a different orientation being much more often infrastructure and disaster relief in terms of mission, training and equipment.
Both the reserves and the NG can be mobilised in times of war or national/sate emergency but active duty troops and other forces cannot by law be employed against the civilian population inside the U.S. unless the governor of the state requests it. When NG forces are mobilised in time of war, their commander changes to be POTUS so that all U.S forces have a unified command.
The active duty army is composed of warriors. They can attack or defend but are not peacekeepers. They have neither the training nor generally the equipment. Active duty M1A2 tanks & self propelled howitzers are of little use compared to the National Guard’s Military police forces, bulldozers and bridging equipment for situations such as Katrina.
Back to Katrina, when Nagin & Blanco were screaming for active duty troops, GWB replied:
- They do not have the skillsets/equipment/training you need except to impose martial law
- I will not employ them unless we setup a unified command structure. You, as governor, cannot command active duty army troops. I request thus that you relinquish command of the Louisiana NG to me as the only way for me to impose this upon you is to declare that your state is in insurrection.
Nagin refused to impose martial law, Blanco refused to relinquish command of the NG and they both went on CNN to declare that that racist bastard GWB was refusing to help to try to cover why getting people to leave their jobs, prepare their heavy equipment and move it over 500 miles after Katrina had already hit was going to take days.
So Nagin & Blanco were screaming for active service members to assist in rescue operations for united states citizens that were dying as a result of flood water trapping them during a crisis, and the leader of the country told them that his hands were tied by the legal system unless they were willing to declare an insurrection which was underway in their territory. An insurrection of water? Or was he planning on shooting the flood victims for staying behind as being troublemakers? Whom is leading this supposed insurrection that needed declaring in order to deploy troops to aid in a humanitarian rescue operation? Maybe pulling out legal loopholes to excuse any action on his part wasn’t racist but I’m trying to picture who would be suing him after the fact for saving lives.
How about to help the civilian population? Is that a stipulation in the law as well? As written I’m quite sure it was meant to prevent the military from being used to attack civilians not to prevent them from saving them from a disaster.
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Insurrection as defined by law has a fairly narrow meaning and the declaration of it for a state by a POTUS also has the effect of suspending that state’s laws and jurisdiction. Learn the implications of what your’e asking for before asking for it.
Nagin & Blanca negligently decided to NOT request NG help from neighbouring states before Katrina hit. Mississippi & Alabama did and thus all the guardsmen within 500 miles were already mobilising and being deployed to these states where they were saving lives because Katrina hit the gulf coast much harder than it did NO. Mississippi & Alabama’s gulf coast’s Casino barges and other large vessels were washed miles inland and the barrier islands were submerged and in many cases destroyed.
Nagin & Blanco waited until after Katrina had hit to ask for NG ressources and the nearest available which had not already been tasked were the Missouri NG which hadn’t yet been mobilised. Had Blanca requested the assistance days earlier there would have been NG ressources tasked with helping NO much closer that would have opened the highways days earlier. This was not a GWB failure, it was a Blanco failure.
Had Nagin used the ressources at his disposition most of NO would have been evacuated to safe grounds and not dying in flooded, cut off from help NO. There was NO excuse for not evacuating the nursing homes using the hundreds of buses and trucks left in parking lots to be drowned.
The biggest, most critical task in restoring order to NO was to open the highways to it and driving M1A2s and marching infantry into the swamps would not have helped at all. As the causeway over Lake Ponchartrain had collapsed over it’s entire length, that meant that the northern route was unavailable, leaving US 10 or route 61 to the west. Had you ever driven over either of these you would know that both traverse swamps using causeways that had also been damaged and that after Katrina both were impassible.
So, no, neither suspending the laws of the state of Louisiana nor sending men into the swamps without the means to repair the roads into NO would have helped. NO’s ressources were already under strain from Katrina and helicopter resupply limited (and already tasked with more lifesaving missions than bringing in more mouths to feed). When Nagin had already been shown to prefer counting political coup rather than actually working to help the people of NO, the limited amount of men they could have brought in by helicopter would only have served as another thing Nagin could point to in front of a CNN camera and say “look these guys are useless in this situation, it’s further proof that GWB is a racist bastard who is letting black people die on purpose”.
Have any more bright ideas? Maybe holding hands and wishing Nagin and Blanco had done their jobs when there was still time?
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Trump pretty much turned the Bush family against him with his treatment of Jeb.
