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Monday, September 05, 2005

If You Give a Damn About Basic Human Decency and Dignity, You Must Read This

5:55 PM

My emotions are not yet up to writing coherently, much less eloquently, on the ugly politics and the even uglier great American Class Divide exposed to the world by Katrina. Fortunately, that is not the case with Jim Amoss, Editor of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans' only daily newspaper. It was my hometown newspaper for 25 years; the first newspaper to carry my byline.

Please read Mr. Amoss's editorial from the Sunday Edition of The Times-Picayune; it is reproduced in full below:

An open letter to the President

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we're going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."

That's unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

5:55 PM / Editor / permalink 4 comments

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4 Comments:

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By Really!, at 9:10 PM

Once again, a biased story not based in fact. The true facts are still coming out and the failures were mainly at the local and state levels -- no matter how much the finger pointers try to rap the federal government.

Many mistakes were made by the mayor and governor.

It's too bad there are so many haters of our president that they will use a tragedy like this to attempt to "get him".

Sorry, once again it won't work because the facts don't back it up.

By Nature Boy, at 3:59 AM

Friday, Sept. 9, 2005 10:53 a.m. EDT
Red Cross Blocked Before Levee Break
Red Cross workers arrived in New Orleans with enough food, water and blankets for thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims the night before levees broke and flooded the city, but were prevented from delivering the aid to stranded citizens by state officials.

"I'm told that they were ready as soon as the winds died down and the roads were passable, which means before the levees broke," Fox News Channel's Major Garrett reported Thursday.
"They were there, they were ready . . . when there clearly were lots of people already at the Superdome, because that's where they were told to go," Garrett told ABC Radio's Sean Hannity.
Though Democrats have insisted that the Bush administration was responsible for delays in getting relief to flood victims, Red Cross officials told Garrett it was the state who blocked their aid convoy.
"The state of Louisiana said, 'Look, our plans call for those people to be moved out. We want them to be moved out. And if [the Red Cross] comes in, they won't move out. So we're not letting you in.'"
Appearing an hour later on Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume," Red Cross President Marty Evans confirmed the stunning development, saying, "We were ready from literally the time the storm blew threw. We were ready to go. We just were not given permission to go in."

By Reality Boy, at 5:03 AM

The Over-Responders
Tony Snow
September 9, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Hurricane Katrina not only covered New Orleans in toxic goo, it also flushed out a large, vocal and potentially pestilential cadre of First Over-Responders.
Rep. Bob Wexler set the stage just minutes after the first levee burst by accusing President Bush of gross incompetence. Rep. Harold Ford followed shortly after with an artless race-card play, wondering aloud why so many people of color had been stranded.
In time, virtually every Democratic panjandrum found some novel way to politicize the Atlantic typhoon. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton inveigled against the evils of Big Oil. Sen. Edward Kennedy suggested holding a forum on New Orleans' racial and economic tensions -- during John Roberts' Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
There was talk of shutting off future tax cuts, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, firing Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, recalling all National Guard units from Iraq and revamping the federal government's plans for dealing with terrorist attacks.
Opinions wildly outnumbered facts among the Over-Responders. At one point, Randall Robinson alleged that locals were cannibalizing the bloated and blistered bodies of the city's dead, while rap star Kanye West repeated the urban legend that black looters were described as "looters," while whites were designated as "survivors."
Military expert Celine Dion, seconded by Michael Moore, alleged that the Pentagon had failed to dispatch helicopters to the scene (the helicopters arrived within hours of the hurricane's making landfall).
The three most popular tropes claimed insanely that the 60,000 or so people dispatched by the federal government to lend aid, along with thousands of private citizens who flocked to the Gulf Coast to offer aid and succor, were guided by racist impulses; that they sought only to help affluent whites, leaving the poor (especially blacks) to fend for themselves in the nightmare world of New Orleans; and that George W. Bush was responsible for this explosion of physical and spiritual misery.
These claims, aided by an onslaught of anti-Bush press accounts, failed utterly. A paltry 13 percent of the public believes the president deserves blame for the mess. Nearly two-thirds of those responding to a CNN-Gallup poll said the administration shouldn't fire anybody -- presumably because mere mortals ought not to take the blame for hurricanes.
Let's face it, the political left -- aided and abetted by Pat Buchanan and members of the bed-wetting right -- made utter fools of themselves. Fortunately, the American public showed a surer sense of proportion and a greater knack for leadership.
While powerless politicians thundered, the public took action. Families packed up goods and shipped them to the Gulf Coast. Houses of worship organized fund-raisers. Truckers suspended normal business and headed to the region, offering to transport goods or people. Individual charitable donations exceeded $500 million in the week after the hurricane ripped into Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
As if to demonstrate the nonpartisan nature of human decency, Albert Gore Jr., once an almost-president, sent a bus south and brought it back with a load of evacuees, upon whom he and others lavished some old-fashioned Southern hospitality. Meanwhile, fellow Tennessean Bill Frist rolled up his sleeves and delivered free medical care to the sick and wounded.
A friend of mine rented some helicopters and, with the approval of state and federal authorities, launched a series of operations to rescue stranded civilians and deliver humanitarian supplies to squatters trying to stay within the city.
These people, and thousands more like them, didn't wait to fill out forms or organize press conferences. They headed to the scene and asked to help. In so doing, they -- not the political yobbos -- set the tone for post-Katrina America.
We Americans always have measured ourselves by three things: our resilience, our ambition and our determination to do the right thing. Every unexpected setback calls forth strengths and virtues latent in the national character -- special skills we never dreamed would lie within us.
When bad times come, we tell ourselves we can create good times. That's why nobody will care a year from now what House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had to say this week. She offered nothing constructive.
Instead, in the manner of New Yorkers after Sept. 11, the folks who form our national heart and soul will bury the dead, care for the living and build upon ruined soil the foundations of a revived civilization -- chastened by the big storm, educated by the failures of a culture that spawned looters and cheats, and inspired by the opportunity to say to the large and deadly storm, "Nice try, but you picked on the wrong country."

By Reality Boy, at 5:15 AM