Al Gore: how different things would have been...

Well, this is final proof, in case you still needed it, that we'd be much better off now if Al Gore had won had been sworn in on January 2001.

Al Gore personally footed the bill to charter two airplanes (one was later paid for by someone else, but it doesn't detract from the initial response,) flew them to New Orleans (on September 3^rd and 4^th, nonetheless,) and saved 270 people that might have otherwise be dead now.

What did Bush do? He stayed on vacation, for two and a half more days after the hurricane struck the Big Easy, and then, only when his numbers started to plunge and everyone started accusing him of carelessness, he sluggishly started looking into the situation, only to make matters worse.

On September 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Simon learned that Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore's son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989, was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

"The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute -- food and water running out, no power, 4 feet of water surrounding the hospital and ... corpses outside," Simon wrote.

Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights, although Larry Flax, founder of California Pizza Kitchens, later pledged to pay for one of them.

[...]

He also recruited two doctors, Spickard and Gore's cousin, retired Col. Dar LaFon, a specialist in internal medicine who once ran the military hospital in Baghdad.

Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee's support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.

About 140 people, many of them sick, landed in Knoxville on September 3. The second flight, with 130 evacuees, landed the next day in Chattanooga.

So, there you have it. Gore acted immediately when asked to do so. Bush stayed on vacation two and a half more days after his help was needed (not to mention the fact that he should have been in the White House at the latest on Saturday or Sunday, BEFORE the hurricane hit, so that he could be ready to intervene as soon as the storm had passed.)