From bad to worse in New Orleans

John Aravosis posted this article by Newsweek on AMERICAblog and it's truly amazing how things went from bad to worse on those fateful days at the end on August (excuse the long post, but it's too shocking.) So many things are just plain wrong with this administration and the way Bush handles his job and what's required of him as President of the United States.

For example, the worst job his advisors have to do is communicate bad news to him. He just doesn't want to hear them, period. That's probably why he lives in an alternate reality from our own:

The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington.

So, the worst storm of the century had hit the day before, the flooding was now worsening, people had died and were dying, and the bad news according to Bush's team was that the President would have had to cut his five-week vacation by two days!! Unbelievable. I guess Bush cutting his vacation short would have meant they'd have to cut theirs as well, so God forbid. Let those people die, who cares, we're rejuvenating ourselves here. Considering how Bush hates the White House, that place must be haunted or something.

As a consequence of Bush making it so hard for his handlers to tell him how things really are:

President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad. The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night.

[...]

How this could be, how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

[...]

Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth.

I just hope that in the end this will be his downfall. We can't afford any more screw-ups of this magnitude. The guy admits himself (proudly, I might add, as if one should take pride in being ignorant,) that he doesn't read newspapers or watch TV. Do the people that work for him behave the same way? It looks like it, since we knew more than all of them did.

A NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a disaster within a disaster.

Criminals. All of them.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you've got."

[...]

There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

HE WENT TO BED!! The Governor of a disastered state calls him asking for help, anything he has, she'll take. And what does he do? He goes to bed. If that's not disconnect, then I don't know what is.

By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event.

They could see pitfalls in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."

So the officials knew early on on Tuesday that New Orleans was in serious trouble and Bush was informed. He decides to cut short his vacation, which is good, until you realize what that actually meant: he did cut it, by two days, but he had 4 more left to go; that meant he stayed on vacation for two more days, in spite of the horrible news. That's unconscionable.

Even worse, when they thought his going to the disaster area could hinder the rescue efforts, they didn't think of what to do instead from a distance to help... no, they kept his schedule unchanged and sent him to give a speech and play the guitar in California!! And Bush didn't flinch. He didn't wonder aloud to his team if maybe there was something he could have done to help. No, why? If my handlers tell me I can stay on vacation and keep having fun, why question them? They sure know what to do. After all, that's why I hired them, so that I wouldn't have to do the hard work.

Unconscionable.

Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics.

How can it be that nobody in the White House, two days after the worst storm ever hit the nation, thought that maybe they shouldn't be screening the calls coming from the Governor of the state most hit by the disaster? How come she wasn't immediately put through to the President? Could it be that maybe he was still sleeping, the poor baby? Or maybe he can't handle bad news before a certain hour of the day.

Incredible. And to think that the person who took the call, the president's Homeland Security adviser, didn't think much of it either... I feel safer already.

Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.

So this idiot, the Secretary of Defense refuses sending in the military, because he believes the National Guard is on the way, and doesn't even bother to check if they Guard is actually going in? Boy, I wonder what he was busy doing during those days, since everyone else in the administration seemed to be on vacation.

This is one of the most shocking paragraphs:

The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters, FEMA, was dysfunctional. After 9/11 raised the profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant, Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"), Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen.

Brown, thankfully, has now resigned, but now before helping hundreds to die. And naturally the greed-pigs keep on gorging on poor people misfortunes. They are actually happy this happened. Now they can earn millions in reconstruction contracts and re-make the coast the way they like it.

Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing.

See, many are to blame for the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, but Bush's name is foremost among them. He's the man ultimately in charge of the whole nation. He has no excuse. If he knew about the situation (and he did,) he should have gone back to DC. Once there he could have seen how bad Brown was handling the situation, and intervened.

Instead, he stayed on vacation, allowing this incompetent to cause more death and destruction.

President Bush is to blame for the worst natural disaster in the history of the US. Period.