Month: September 2005

Blame The Victim Talking Points

I heard this shocking exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie MacIntyre lst night too, and was stunned. There is clearly a culture of pass-the-buck whining about military failure taking over the Pentagon if their first reaction is to complain about partisanship…

But I think there is more to it. Everyone has noted that Michael Brown (the estate planning lawyer/Bush crony who is in charge of the biggest logistical challenge in FEMA’s history) was making the rounds implying that the victims asked for what they got when they didn’t obey the mandatory evacuation. But he wasn’t the only one who said this explicitly. I wrote yesterday that Michael Chertoff, his boss, said the same thing:

“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”

This was an official talking point. On Thursday, September 1st, three days after the scope of the disaster was well known, George W. Bush sent his disaster officials out to the media with the instructions that they were to blame the victims — the same day that we were seeing dead bodies and dehydrated children all over our television sets.

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Disaster Pageant

Is it really appropriate for all these disaster officials to be on television pretending to be “briefing” the president (who is dressed in his campaign costume) so that he can appear to be engaged in the problem? Don’t they have better things to do than raise Bush’s poll numbers?

Now he’s “going to go comfort some people.” Who says he isn’t doing his job?

Update: Well, waddaya know. The next pictures we see are of Bush “comforting” a pretty young black woman and her white husband(?) They were very good. Must have had an awesome audition to make it onto “Presidential Kabuki: In Excess.”

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More Stories

From Salon:

Lacking any reliable source of information about how to proceed, residents from the flooded eastern parts of the city and stranded visitors wander westward in a state of desperation. People shout at cars, pleading for rides to anywhere, and ask each other where they’re headed. Several thousand residents forced from their homes line Convention Center Avenue, where rumor has it evacuations were set to begin. National Guard personnel say they had no immediate plans to begin evacuations from that location.

While chatting with some of the National Guardsmen, another guardsman approaches and informs us that a woman is in the middle of a stroke around the corner. The guardsmen shrug. There is no emergency medical tent in the downtown area, and many people in need of medicine have no way of getting what they need, even inside the shelters. On our way into the French Quarter, a wild-eyed man flags down our car, begging us for insulin or information about where some can be found. We cannot help him.

In contrast, some residents of the French Quarter appear comfortable, well-fed and relaxed. About 150 New Orleans police officers have commandeered the Royal Omni Hotel, part of the international luxury chain of Omni hotels that is housed in an elegant 19th century building, complete with crystal chandeliers and a rooftop pool. “All of the officers that are here, I can tell you in a classical sense, are gladiators,” says Capt. Kevin Anderson, commander of the Eighth District of the NOPD (French Quarter). “To be able to put your family’s concerns aside to protect the citizens of New Orleans, it’s just an awesome job,” he says.

Across the street from the Royal Omni at the Eighth District police department, several police officers keep a wary eye on the street with shotguns at the ready, while some fellow officers grill sausage links over charcoal barbecues. They are under strict orders not to communicate with the media. Capt. Anderson does confirm, however, that locations where officers were housed came under gunfire on Tuesday night. No officers were injured. “It is a very dangerous situation that we’re in,” Anderson says.

Apart from rescue operations, the police department patrols for looters, who have ransacked stores in virtually every part of the city. Looters are visible on every street corner. Every kind of business, from rundown corner markets to the Gucci storefront on South Peters Street, has been looted.

We walk half a block down Royal Street from the Eighth District headquarters and come upon Brennan’s Restaurant, one of New Orleans’ most venerable dining institutions. The Brennans are a high-profile family of restaurateurs and run several of the highest-end eateries in town. Jimmy Brennan and a crew of his relatives are holing up in the restaurant along with the chef, Lazone Randolph. They are sleeping on air mattresses, drinking Cheval Blanc, and feasting on the restaurant’s reserves of haute Creole food.

The atmosphere in the French Quarter, while relatively quiet, is decidedly tense, but Brennan isn’t worried. “We’re not too concerned. The police let us go over to the Royal Omni, to take a shower, freshen up, and we cooked them some prime rib. We take care of them, they take care of us,” says Randolph. Two Brennan emissaries whisk past, bearing multilayer chocolate cakes, headed toward the precinct. “This has been working out real well for us,” says Jimmy Brennan.

Contrary to many reports, the French Quarter remains undamaged by flooding. The streets are dry and damage to the 18th and 19th century buildings appears to be minimal. Heavily pierced French Quarter denizens are emerging slowly, almost groggily, and some are looking to evacuate. One woman, wearing a black lace slip and fanning herself with a souvenir fan from a production of “Les Miserables,” makes her way toward the Superdome, carrying no luggage.

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I Wondered About This

From Kos diarist Militarytracy:

I have also spoken today on post here with Army pilots really pissed off that when the helicopter was shot at yesterday at the Superdome, they suspended operations. What I have been told is IT IS A MILITARY HELICOPTER AND YOU ARE PREFORMING A KIND OF MILITARY MISSION AND YOU ARE TAKING FIRE SO WHAT’S THE FUCKING PROBLEM? I heard this from pilots who have served in Iraq. They are really upset right now that it is okay to take fire to liberate Iraqis but it isn’t okay to take fire attempting to rescue and save people in your own country!

I’ve been a little bit gobsmacked by this fraidy-cat reaction to the surly thugs in the streets I’ve been hearing about all day. The national guard and the coast guard are trained to operate in hostile environments where people are shooting at them. And big city police forces are no slouches either.

Yet they completely cancelled the rescue operation because some bozo shot at a helicopter. And the national guard now refuses to escort patients who are being transferred from hospitals that have no power, food and water.

Gosh I sure hope someone is guarding the oil ministry.

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They Are Invisible

Maybe this will show Michael Chertoff that evacuating wasn’t a matter of people stubbornly refusing to obey a mandatory order. These people are rich and white:

BLITZER: The disaster, what’s unfolding in New Orleans, elsewhere in the Gulf as well, the situation, especially, especially worrisome in downtown New Orleans. We have on the line now Phyllis Petrich. She’s stranded in one of the hotels in New Orleans. Phyllis, where exactly are you?

PHYLISS PETRICH, STRANDED IN NEW ORLEANS: I’m at the Ritz Carlton on Canal Street in the French Quarter.

BLITZER: How long have you been there?

PETRICH: We arrived here actually for holiday on Thursday evening and we were evacuated to the Grand Ballroom by the middle of the night Sunday. We have been on rations since then. They have evacuated some of the hotel. There are about 300 people left. The Ritz is trying to get buses in here. FEMA will not let them in. They got a group out last night. And of the three buses that got out, FEMA commandeered one of them. We have no idea where they’ve taken those people. We’re in dire straits here. There is no electricity. The sewage is backing up. As I said, the water supply is running low.

We do have a team here of infection diseases doctors that were here for a conference who have set up a small infirmary to care for the cases of dysentery and vomiting that have come up, as well as other people who have had some illnesses. But all of those medications are now being depleted, and I don’t know that anyone is aware that we’re here. I realize we’re not top priority on anyone’s list, but we are here and we are in dire straits, and we need someone to know that we’re here, to come in and help to get us out of here.

BLITZER: Do you have enough food and water right now, Phyllis?

PETRICH: Well I don’t believe we have very much food left at all. I know that we didn’t have any lunch today. We had just a little biscuit or a cookie for breakfast and all we’re each being given is a glass of water.

BLITZER: And it’s impossible for you simply to leave the hotel and walk out. Not only are there floodwaters there, but it’s dangerous, the violence, the looting, the snipers. It’s a very dangerous situation.

PETRICH: It is a very dangerous situation. Fortunately, the Ritz has been wonderful. Apparently they have a lot of off-duty policemen that they have access to, that are guarding the hotel with shotguns. They themselves are afraid to go outside, because policemen are being shot at. And it is very, very difficult situation here. And I just don’t know how we can impress upon people what is really going on here. I think people just don’t have a concept, and it’s being glossed over, it’s being handled so poorly, it just amazes us to hear what’s going on outside. That people just don’t understand just the seriousness of the situation.

BLITZER: Where are you from, Phyllis?

PETRICH: I’m from Maryland right now. I actually live in Wisconsin, but I’m a long-term job assignment in Maryland.

BLITZER: If your family if your friends are watching, what would you like to say to them? PETRICH: That I am alive and well at this moment. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I am alive and safe for the time being, and I just want to get home to them.

BLITZER: Are you traveling by yourself or do you have children with you?

PETRICH: With my husband. We came here to celebrate our anniversary. And it’s one we will not forgot for many years to come.

BLITZER: Well, Phyllis, good luck to you. We’ll certainly pass on your concerns to authorities and try to make sure that people don’t forgot that these hotels, including the Ritz Carlton Hotel in the French Quarter, are endangered right now.

PETRICH: I know, and it would be a different situation if we had made the choice of our own volition to stay here. We could not get out. Once the storm started to hit the airlines shut down immediately. And none of us could get flights out. We would have left if we could have, but we could not and that’s why we’re in the situation that we’re in.

BLITZER: One final question, Phyllis, before I let you go. Are there any law enforcement authorities, National Guard, police, first responders, FEMA officials, anyone at the Ritz Carlton Hotel trying to help any of you.

PETRICH: Not that we have seen. No. Not at all.

BLITZER: They’re invisible right now.

PETRICH: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces who can get information in that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

BLITZER: Well, if it makes you feel any better, we’re told that they’re on the way. We don’t know how long it will take to get there. They’re deploying thousands of troops. But it clearly will take some time for them to get to the scene where you are. Phyllis, we’ll talk with you. And good luck to you, your husband and all your friends. I’m sure you’ve become friendly with a lot of these people at the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

PETRICH: … absolutely wonderful people. There is a group of British nationals that have gotten to BBC. And we’re hoping that with us, trying to get to as much people as we can, they will understand just how dangerous and, you know, difficult the situation is for everyone here.

BLITZER: All right. Thank you very much, Phyllis. Good luck. We’ll check back with you. Phyllis Petrich, like so many others, about 300 people, she said, stranded now at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, and no help in sight, at least not now, and they’re running short of food and water.

Even the Ritz-Carlton is out of food and swimming in shit.

Let’s hope these folks don’t have to go out and try to rustle up some food and water. The president said there is zero tolerance for “looters.” According to Is That Legal, fellows at the American Enterprise Institute agree with Peggy Noonan that looters should be shot:

I think shooting looters is a compassionate way to protect the safety and well-being of law-abiding citizens. Time after time it has been shown that the way to prevent deadly anarchic riots is to take firm decisive action to prevent matters from getting to a tipping point.

Yes, a little summary justice does go a long way toward “preventing matters from getting to the tipping point.” Except, of course, it doesn’t. What is needed is a large, visible police and national guard presence directing rescue activity and keeping order. Why that isn’t happening is the real question.

I seem to remember something in the recent past — a war torn city perhaps — that also dissolved into chaos and anrachy when the authorities failed to provide security. Somebody important said “stuff happens” and “freedom is untidy.” Where was that again? It’s right on the tip of my tongue…

If at first you don’t succeed, clap your hands and do exactly the same thing over and over again.

Update: Some of the “right” people are looting, too. Should they be shot, Peggy?

Five days after Susan Dewey arrived in New Orleans to celebrate her birthday, she was so desperate to get out that she banded with hundreds of other tourists to hire 10 buses for $25,000 to rescue them.

After waiting hours, they learned government officials had commandeered their buses to evacuate others.

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The hurricane hit Monday. The flooding and looting began Tuesday. By Wednesday, Dewey was stealing to eat.

She said hotel staff encouraged guests to loot a nearby store for food, so that’s what Dewey and her boyfriend did.

“I had Power Bars, I had nuts because there were a couple (hotel) rooms open, and we raided their mini bars,” Dewey said.

That day, police went door-to-door to order local residents out of the hotel and to the New Orleans Convention Center, Dewey said.

The handful of managers left at the hotel told guests they had booked 10 buses for $25,000 to evacuate them and those from the Crowne Plaza Astor Downtown. Each passenger paid $45. The hotel staff began lining up elderly and ill people outside about 7:30 p.m.

“I couldn’t count how many wheelchairs you saw,” Dewey said.

The guests waited until 9:30 p.m. when a manager told them the buses were confiscated by the military.

Also planning to leave on one of the buses was Bill Hedrick, a Houston oilman, and his family, including his mother-in-law, who uses a walker.

“We kept hearing they were coming, they were coming,” he said. When the crowd learned the buses would never arrive, “everyone was totally stunned,” said Hedrick, who moved on to the convention center.

Dewey said she was ordered to head to the convention center

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It’s Time

I have to say that I’m with Wolcott on this one.

No, this is the time for politics, none better, because I can tell you just from being out of NY a few days that a lot of people in this country are shocked and sobered by New Orleans, but they’re also worried and pissed off. They’re making the connection between the money, manpower, and resources expended in Iraq and how raggedy-ass the rescue effort has been in the Gulf. If you don’t say it now when people’s nerves are raw and they’re paying full attention, it’ll be too late once the waters receded and the media-emoting “healing process” begins.

This event is emblematic of Republican governance. It encompasses every fuck-up they’ve perpetrated since they took over the entire national governament — failure to plan, embracing only the best case scenario, lagging response, ignoring the experts, slashing funds and endless, endless happy talk that we can SEE WITH OUR OWN EYES is bullshit. (They are already saying that nobody is reporting all the “good news.”)

The fact that most of these refugees (a word that I can hardly believe I’m typing) are black and poor residents who were unable to leave and were therefore, left to die, is emblematic also.

No, this is all about politics. It is about a GOP era of massive tax breaks for very rich Americans, billion dollar a week elective wars that we are losing while more and more people fall into poverty and the infrastructure of this country crumbles around our ears.

This failed experiment in free-market magical thinking can be summed up entirely by pictures of dead elderly Americans on the streets of New Orleans.

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How Could It Be Otherwise?

More damning evidence of leadership malpractice:

Here’s a piece from March 7, 2002 from the Clarion-Ledger on the circumstances of Parker’s firing. Here are the first several grafs …

The assistant secretary of the Army, Mississippi’s former U.S. Rep. Mike Parker, was forced out Wednesday after he criticized the Bush administration’s proposed spending cuts on Army Corps of Engineers’ water projects, members of Congress said.

“Apparently he was asked to resign,” said U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., a member of the House Appropriations Committee’s energy and water development subcommittee that oversees the corps’ budget.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, also said Parker was dismissed.

Parker’s nomination to head the corps drew heavy criticism last year from environmental groups pushing to downsize the agency, calling its flood control projects too costly and destructive.

Parker earned the ire of administration officials when he questioned Bush’s planned budget cuts for the corps, including two controversial Mississippi projects.

“I think he was fired for being too honest and not loyal enough to the president,” said lobbyist Colin Bell, who represents communities with corps-funded projects.

Bell said Parker resigned about noon after being given about 30 minutes to choose between resigning or being fired.

As Josh Marshall says, this is the Bush administration in a nutshell. It has happened over and over again with disasterous results from General Shinseki to Bunnatine Greenhouse just the other day. They listen to no one who knows what they are doing.

This is banana republic shit. They funnel money to their supporters and reward their contributors and run inexplicable wars that make no sense — at the expense of the citizens of this country. It was inevitable that this incompetent, myopic administration would fail when faced with a major disaster during this second term. They are incapable of doing anything else.

Via Media Matters, here is another perfect example of Republican thinking on this issue:

After the Storm
Hurricane Katrina: The good, the bad, the let’s-shoot-them-now.

By Peggy Noonan

As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human being–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.

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We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down there stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.

If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades

Yes, nothing must be allowed to blemish the steely-eyed rocket man’s moment of pulsating, wet-making glory.

Here are a couple of people you won’t have to waste a bullet on, you fucking privileged asshole:

A military truck with a lone soldier onboard drives by Dorothy Divic, 89, as onlookers trying to revive Divic yell in vain for him to stop, on a street outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

A man holding a baby uncovers the body of a dead man, suspected to have been sitting there for two days, outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005.

Sigh. Give money if you can — click on the ad at left. The liberal blogosphere is setting the goal of raising a million dollars for the relief effort.

Moveon is sponsoring www.hurricanehousing.org to help displaced people find temporary shelter. If you can help out with that, click on over and see what you can do.

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Qu’ils Mangent De La Brioche

I don’t know if all of you have seen the footage today from the convention center in New Orleans, but it is shocking. There are dead bodies lying all over the place. People are waiting for help and the only people who’ve come in there are news crews and Harry Connick Jr. (And fuck you Michele Malkin.) It’s a living hell.

The MSNNC reporter just said that he counted 82 buses lined up outside the city waiting to go in to evacuate people from the convention center but they won’t go because they’ve been told it isn’t safe.

On 9/11 we had cops and firefighters running into collapsing buildings to rescue people. Today, days after the crisis hit, I’m watching people with little babies desperate for food and water and nobody is coming in to help them.

What in the hell is going on?

Perhaps this comment by Homeland Security chief Chertoff explains the Bush administration’s slow motion response:

“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”

For Christ’s sake the tourists couldn’t get out either. All the rental cars were booked and the airport was closed. Lucky for them, most of them were staying in high rise hotels and they rode out the storm. And now they have someplace to go — home. The locals who didn’t have cars aren’t quite so lucky, are they?

I think Chertoff’s comment says everything we need to know about how this government viewed this catastrophe. “We told ’em to get out; if they refused (or couldn’t) they brought this on themselves.” That’s the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. “You’re on your own, losers.”

I think Americans expect more of their government than that. That comment should be hung around the necks of these poor planning, corruption spreading, deficit spending, budget slashing, warwmongering, tax cutting assholes like a dead Louisiana pelican.

Those of you who would like to donate can click the ad on the left. At this point,however, it might be more useful to actually drive to New Orleans with some food and water.

Update: SKBubba says call your congressman. He’s got the links.

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