The Hurricane Katrina Blame Game

I find it amazing how when we are facing the worst natural disaster to ever hit the United States in recent times, that certain groups and individuals are using this tragedy to make as much political hay as they can. According to them, President Bush and his cabal of evil Republicans are to blame for Hurricane Katrina. They are using all the usual hysterical venom: Global Warming due to Bush refusing to sign the Kyoto Agreement; the War in Iraq, and how the money we are wasting on that war could have been used to make New Orleans more "hurricane proof"; Bush cutting the Army Corps of Engineers budget, and how that caused New Orleans to end up under water...the list goes on and on. The following link to a blog site shows the difference between the mindset of those on the Left and those on the Right when it comes to a major natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. http://acepilots.com/mt/2005/09/01/bloggers-on-hurricane-katrina/ It is just further proof that the Left is so blinded by their hatred of our president, because President Bush stands in the way of their march toward establishing Communism in America. They won't even look at where most of the blame really lies. What a difference in rhetoric between the aftermath of 9/11, when we came together as a nation, even if it was temporary, and now. Why? Because domestic issues are supposed to be the strong point of the Democrats, especially Liberal Democrats. Here you have a disaster of huge proportions in which most of the victims are poor, black, and dependent on nanny government social programs. This is the indisputable proof that finally exposes those Big Brother programs as failures, yet the Left can never admit this. Instead, they have to put the blame somewhere else . Since they hate President Bush with a passion, they have to put the blame on him in their spoiled "me me me" look at the world. Because of these programs, a certain strata of society has become completely reliant on the government for everything. As a result, they have become incapable of thinking for themselves, even when it involves their own personal safety when told to evacuate. The red herrings must be put out there to shift the blame from those responsible...responsible for their own safety, responsible for the implementation of a workable evacuation plan, and responsible for requesting pre-authorized and pre-positioned federal assistance and coordinating that assistance with local, state, and federal authorities into a workable disaster management plan. Is President Bush completely exonerated from fault in this? No. There were failures at all levels of government from the President all they way down to the local level. If President Bush had declared the Gulf area a state of emergency as soon as Katrina crossed over Florida, it would have given an extra day to help evacuate the area. One day is a lot of time when you are dealing with a huge storm like Hurricane Katrina. FEMA Director Michael Brown dropped the ball coordinating many of the relief efforts at the federal level. Despite the fact that he performed his job with the utmost professional competence coordinating relief efforts in four hurricanes in Florida, he was way over his head with Katrina. As soon as that became obvious, President Bush should have removed him, and not waited for the Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, to do it. However, let's put the childish "Chimpy McHalliburton Bush" name calling aside, and let's deal with the issue of dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

First of all, let's put the real blame about Hurricane Katrina where it belongs...Mother Nature. Yes I know, it's all because of global warming and the Fascist Republicans, especially a Nazi named George W. Bush, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gasses. How conveniently it is forgotten that the US Senate, which you would know if you had taken Civics in high school, is responsible for the ratification of treaties. The Senate voted against it unanimously during the Clinton Administration. That means that both evil stupid Republicans and so called enlightened Democrats refused to ratify a flawed document that exempted India and China, the two biggest polluters in the world, and the two worst causes of greenhouse gasses, from abiding by it's directives. Kyoto's true purpose is to partially collapse the US Economy in order to make it easier to force the US into a one world Socialist government controlled by the UN. This is why the Left is so adamant about getting Kyoto ratified. It has nothing to do with the environment at all. It's all about being against Capitalism. I'm glad that the Senate was unanimously smart enough to realize that.

Studies have shown that Kyoto's plan to cut back greenhouse gas production to 5.2% less than 1990 levels will have a negligible effect on global temperature changes. The reduction in temperature in the world would only be .23 degrees F by the year 2100. Documented evidence available online (I won't do your homework for you), shows that average temperatures in the South Eastern United States haven't changed since 1895, and at Dawson, Yukon Territory, Canada, which is near the Arctic Circle, temperatures were actually warmer, with twice as many yearly averages about 25 degrees F than below 25 degrees F, during the first half of the 20th Century as opposed to the second half. A 2002 study of Antarctica temperature patterns shows that there was a net cooling down there from 1966 to 2000. When you hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. screaming about how Bush and of course, Haley Barbour, the current Governor of Mississippi, because he's the former head of the Republican Party, are responsible for global warming and as a result this hurricane, you begin to wonder what this Socialist Elite lawyer and environmental activist has been smoking. This is the same Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who opposed a wind turbine farm off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, which would have supplied much of Cape Cod with electricity, because the turbines would have appeared as tiny blips on the horizon from the Kennedy Compound. It's the old "not in my backyard" bullshit from the hypocritical Left Socialist Progressive Elites.

The Marxist doom and gloom environmental groups were claiming that we were heading into an ice age back in the 1970s. When that was shown to be untrue, they turned 180 degrees and starting their global warming hysteria. Which is it, an ice age or global warming? How could we go from one to the other in 40 years? The fact is, we can't. It's whatever they can use to destroy Capitalism and further advance their anti-American Communist causes.

Studies show that hurricane activity runs in cycles, just like any other weather pattern, much of which is dependent on the sun's sunspot activity. The upsurge of hurricanes that we are seeing is very similar to the amount and severity of hurricanes that were happening 75 to 100 years ago. I don't think that anyone was driving SUVs back then. Over the next 20 years, we are going to see an increase in hurricane activity, and then it will subside for a while. Much of this also has to do with cyclical changes in the ocean's surface temperature, which have occurred numerous times over the past millions of years. Human beings have nothing to do with this. These changes also contribute somewhat to the number and severity of hurricanes.

New Orleans, which suffered a tremendous blow this time, could possibly get hit again, but the next time it could be a Category 5 and not a Category 4. Scientists predict that a Category 5 hurricane making a direct hit on New Orleans would cause all the levees to breach, and the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain to both drain into the city at the same time. The city would end up under 40 feet of water in a matter of hours, and there would be over 100,000 people drowned as a result. As devastating as Hurricane Katrina, and the aftermath have been to the city, it could have been much worse. Do we want to take that chance? The rebuilding process is going to take years. I say bulldoze the place, and start again in another location. Get the rest of the people out of there, get them to safety, and then abandon New Orleans forever. The current plan is to rebuild the city where it stands. Personally, I'm in agreement with Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Speaker Hastert feels that New Orleans should be rebuilt somewhere else. Here's why I feel that he's right.

First of all, much of New Orleans sits anywhere from 8 to 30 feet below sea level. A system of dikes and levees keeps the Mississippi River, Lake Ponchartrain, and indirectly, the Gulf Of Mexico at bay. The levees have been a concern for a long time. However, over the years, money from the Army Corps of Engineers budget for upgrading the levees has been routinely diverted to other projects including city beautification projects and the 1984 Worlds Fair. This is not a result of Bush supposedly cutting the ACE budget. The ACE budget in 2004 was $3.5 billion dollars, and the 2005 budget was $4.1 billion dollars. How is that a cut? The amount was to be reduced in the 2006 budget to $3.9 billion dollars. There is less funding needed, because there are less new contruction projects to be funded. How does a 2006 budget affect a 2005 hurricane? It doesn't. Not only that, the levees that burst were the ones that had been recently upgraded and strengthened. The head of the Army Corps of Engineers said that throwing more money at the situation wouldn't have mattered anyway. Years ago the levees were designed to handle a Category 3 storm based on a cost benefit analysis that determined that it would be more cost effective to evacuate the city in the event of the rare Category 4 and Category 5 storms that could hit the area. Katrina was a huge Category 4 hurricane.

Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965. Hurricane Ivan flooded the city in 2004. Who knows how many times it was flooded during storms before people started keeping track of them. The American Indians in that region warned the French settlers not to build there, because the area was subject to flooding whenever there were severe storms. This year, Hurricane Katrina almost took the grand prize. If it had been a Category 5 storm, and had been a direct hit with the eye crossing the French Quarter, it would have been Armageddon on Earth. Katrina was a Category 4 storm that went slightly east of the city. In addition, it was a huge storm that wreaked havoc over an area the size of Great Britain in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. It's going to cost over $150 billion dollars just to rebuild New Orleans back to zero. That's not even making any improvements. That doesn't mean the cost to rebuild the other areas hit by the hurricane. That means $150 billion dollars to rebuild the ghettos back to being ghettos. That's not fair to the US taxpayers nor is it fair to the poor people that live in those poor neighborhoods. If you start somewhere else, That $150 billion dollars will go a long way towards building a modern city that is not below sea level, with modern structures, modern oil, gas, and sewage systems, and modern highways and transportation systems away from the flood plane, rather than just bringing it back to zero. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. New Orleans will be rebuilt right on it's current site. Since that's the plan, there then has to be a workable and tested emergency plan in place ready to kick in if a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina shows signs of heading in that direction. Even if the levees were upgraded to withstand a Category 5 storm, there is no guarantee that they will. The first priority is to evacuate that city, even if it means having to forcibly remove people from their homes. Here's my feeling on how to fix the problem:

Since there are no plans to rebuild New Orleans somewhere else, there has got to be a functional emergency plan in effect, and it has to be implemented in a timely fashion. That plan needs to do one thing above anything else, and that is to execute a total evacuation of the city before a Category 3 or larger hurricane hits. This needs to be completed 24 hours prior to landfall. The governor needs to coordinate with local officials in the city, as well as local officials throughout the state in order to provide temporary shelter in schools, municipal buildings, armories, etc. for the people displaced because of the pending storm. If need be, you request federal aid as soon as it is offered, in order to expedite the evacuation plan, and to set up temporary shelters in neighboring states. If the hurricane goes off course and misses the city, so what. Yes, government officials will look like idiots, but people will be alive, and that's what counts. People will forgive them. If you are going to err, you err on the side of caution. You don't worry about whether or not businesses will sue the city for loss of revenue if an evacuation plan proves unnecessary. This is why Mayor Nagin stalled until it was too late to start evacuating the city. He was afraid of a lawsuit. If it does hit, you will still have the property damage that you do now, but you won't have the mayhem that was experienced after Katrina struck when the poor people in the ghettos suddenly found themselves stranded without food, water, and the social services from the nanny state that they have become completely conditioned into believing are their birthrights. This dependency mindset, perpetuated by the Liberals and their feel good social programs, has created at least two generations of poor people who have become brainwashed into helplessness to the point where they can't even take action to try to save themselves when pending doom is on the horizon.

Many of the poor people in New Orleans happen to be African Americans. There are, however, many poor white people in New Orleans too. Why didn't you see pictures of them on TV stranded on the rooftops waiting for someone to come get them? Because, you can't use one of the Liberals favorite tools, the race card, if you show white people. The only difference between poor black people and poor white people is their skin color. People are people. We are all human beings. The result of that dependency mindset in the aftermath of this hurricane, is the proof that shows the Liberals' big government programs to help the poor are total failures. Therefore, the race card red herring gets thrown out there in order to protect the fiefdom of the Liberals' welfare state. If you use welfare as a bridge to help the poor get back on their feet, and make personal accountability as part of the welfare plan, you can foster a climate of self reliance. This ability to think for oneself could make a difference between survival and death in the event of a major catastrophic event like what took place in New Orleans. I could claim that the Left's insistence on perpetuating the welfare state in this country is nothing but closet racism on the part of the Liberals against black people, but I won't. I'll just say that the way the social services systems in this country are designed and managed, their purpose is to keep poor people, mostly African Americans, prisoners of a dependency system. This is so the people managing those programs can feel superior to those trapped in the system. Plus, keeping people dependent on the system guarantees that the social services personnel will continue to have jobs.

There were about 60,000 disabled and elderly people that were not capable of getting themselves out. Those people are the government's primary evacuee responsibility. Most of those who chose to stay behind were perfectly capable of getting themselves out of there, even if it meant using their own two feet. Some did use their own two feet to get out of there, but many of them didn't. They are so conditioned to having the government wipe their asses for them, that they were waiting for, and many are still waiting, for the government to tell them what to do. Yes, most of them didn't have cars. They could have taken a city bus to a higher ground area of the city or to the suburbs. I don't buy the Left's whine that these people couldn't afford the bus fare. They can afford that can of malt liquor or that rock of crack cocaine can't they? However, once you declare a mandatory evacuation, you have a moral responsibility to get everyone out regardless of whether or not they are capable of doing it themselves. You declare martial law, and you mobilize all available transportation resources for the purpose of evacuation of the city, and get everyone out. Everyone! Yes, it will take several trips, but if you start early enough, you can do it. If you read the New Orleans evacuation plan, it calls for private automobiles as the first means of evacuation and then public transportation as the second means. That would work fine if it was put in effect. It obviously wasn't. Washington, DC's Metro Transit Authority, and other city transit companies, sent busses down there to aid in the evacuation. They came back empty, because when they got there, no one could tell them where to go. WalMart sent truck loads of bottled water, but they were turned away from New Orleans and diverted somewhere else, because the Governor of Louisiana had issued an order not allowing food and water to be brought into the city. She was afraid there would be rioting. She wanted to get control of the city first. When you see the pictures of acres of school busses and city busses up to their roofs in flood waters, it's obvious that city and state emergency management personnel were asleep at the switch. According to federal emergency management rules, the first 48 to 72 hours of a state of emergency are supposed to be handled by local and state officials, not the federal government. No, those rules were not put in place by George W. Bush either.

There is carping from the Left that Bush was on vacation and didn't respond. First of all, the President is never really on vacation. He has just moved his workplace from the White House to his ranch in Crawford Texas. We know damn well that while he is out there mending a fence, there are advisors briefing him on what is going on domestically, and throughout the world at the same time. President Bush declared the area a state of emergency before the hurricane hit in order to free up federal funds in case they were needed. However, I do feel that he should have declared the area a state of emergency earlier. When it looked like Hurricane Katrina was heading toward the area, Bush called the governors of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and told them that federal resources, including 10,000 federal troops were pre-positioned and ready to move at their request. The governors of Alabama and Mississippi did request federal assistance. The governor of Louisiana did not. If she had, federal troops would have been there in a matter of hours to aid in the evacuation of the city. She needed to consult her advisors. Bush pleaded with her to request federal aid Sunday morning. She still needed more time to make a decision. That night she admitted that in a news conference. The hurricane hit early Monday morning.

By Tuesday, there was total anarchy in the streets with looting, thugs breaking into any store they could find in order to steal TV sets and stereos that they couldn't use anyway, and stealing guns in order to use for other purposes. It was their way of throwing a temper tantrum because the social services that they have become so conditioned to rely on were taken away from them. Therefore, with their entitlement mentality, anyone's goods whether they are from a local WalMart, or from one of the million dollar homes on St. Charles Place are fair game. They weren't just stealing food, which is forgivable under these circumstances. Rapes and murders were taking place in the Superdome, which was being used as a shelter. Two five year old girls were raped to death in gang related violence there. In addition, these "victims of society" were storming hospitals, shooting doctors and nurses, taking their keys, and unlocking drug lockers to steal thousands of doses of codeine, Oxycodone, and whatever street drug that they knew they could sell back in the ghetto. Yes, the same people that couldn't afford that bus fare out of the city, could now buy a pill from a street pusher for five bucks while still waiting for the government to come get them. The Governor finally requested federal aid Tuesday night, and federal troops were starting to come in by Wednesday morning. Why didn't Governor Blanco request aid sooner? Because she didn't want to relinquish control of the state to federal authorities. Then she would have had to answer to the race war poverty pimps for "siccing the federal government on poor black people." You hear Mayor Nagin screaming, "Where was the Federal Government?" Mister Mayor, I'm sure an intelligent politician like yourself is fully aware that in a state of emergency, federal aid must be requested by the governor of that state. That's the law. It falls under the Posse Commitatis Act (Title 18, USC, Section 1385) ,and the Insurrection Act (Title 10 USC, Sections 371-381). The questions asked should be, "Why didn't Governor Blanco request federal assistance when it was offered?" Or the obvious..."Why didn't you, the Mayor, make damn well sure that New Orleans implemented its evacuation plan in a timely fashion?"

Why won't the Left controlled Main Stream Media hold the governor and the mayor responsible? Because it wouldn't be politically correct to hold a black mayor and a female governor responsible for their incompetence, when they can accuse a white male Republican president and his administration, that they hate with a passion, of mishandling the situation. Sorry, but the primary responsibility for the deaths of thousands of poor people in New Orleans, mostly black, lies on the hands of an incompetent governor and an almost equally incompetent mayor...both of whom happen to be Liberal Democrats. Hopefully, most of the American people will see through the red herring being thrown down here and remember the attempt to play the blame game. The problem was big government red tape at all levels, the perpetuation of a nanny state that forces poor people to remain poor and reliant on big government social programs, and the failure to act due to political posturing in order to protect political asses when there is pending doom on the horizon as a lead up to the 2006 and 2008 elections. In the meantime, let's take a good hard look at our plans for emergency management at all levels; local, state, and federal, and streamline as much of the red tape as we can. We have learned a very valuable lesson from this disaster. One thing that will help is to repeal the Posse Commitatis Act. Then the feds could move in and take control without having to be invited in by the governor. That includes FEMA too. FEMA couldn't do anything except preposition relief personnel and materials until the governor requested federal aid. That's the law. In addition, FEMA needs to be taken out from under the Department of Homeland Security. Having it there adds another layer of red tape that is unnecessary. I agree 100% with Senator Hillary Clinton in this matter. If the President had been able to federalize the Louisiana National Guard, send in FEMA and send in active duty federal troops well in advance of the hurricane, there would have been a much more efficient evacuation of the area, and there would have been a much easier mop up situation after the fact. There would also be a lot more people alive and well as a result. Yes, they would have still lost everything, but you can always rebuild your life again, even if you have to do it from scratch. People do it all the time, and in most cases, they end up better off than they were before. A deadly hurricane will hit New Orleans again someday. In addition, what happens if terrorists happen to take out a major city with a nuclear weapon? What will be our response? If the response is anything like I'm reading on the Left's blog sites, MoveOn.org, The Nation, and the other anti-Bush, anti-America "Progressive" sites, we've got a problem. It's time for the Left to grow up.