A 21st Century Marie Antoinette

Posted on September 6, 2005
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MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann rips the Bush administration a seemingly-deserved new one in his editorial on the response of American Federal politicians to the flooding in southern Louisiana: MSNBC-Olbermann-Rant-090505.mov (or the MSNBC transcript):

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.
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For many of this country’s citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to ‘08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — “New Orleans.”

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette.

He’s not the only one. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin took the Federal government to task for their lack of planning and response in this audio interview as well (full CNN transcript), offering what may very well be the most frank, honest opinions out of the mouth of a politician in the past fifty years:

We ain’t talking about — you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.

I’m like, “You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.”

That’s — they’re thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can’t emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.
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We told everybody the importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, “Please, please take care of this. We don’t care what you do. Figure it out.
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But we authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the president unprecedented powers lickety-quick to take care of New York and other places.

Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody’s eyes light up — you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can’t figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.

A few malcontents? The criticisms continue:

“We have been abandoned by our own country.”

said Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish west of New Orleans, about the current administration in an interview.

Evidently also not one to play the party politic game, he continues:

Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now. It’s so obvious.
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Sir, they [the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans] were told like me, every single day, “The cavalry’s coming,” on a federal level, “The cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming, the cavalry’s coming.” I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry’s still not here yet, but I’ve begun to hear the hoofs, and we’re almost a week out.
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Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago.
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And I want to give you one last story and I’ll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” And he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday.” And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

Even the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, weighed in, stating:

“We are an embarrassment to the world.”

This criticism is not the result of some Liberal plot to kick an administration when it’s facing what could and should be considered the greatest challenges it’s had to face yet, this is legitimate rage against an administration that has failed it’s own people and seems pathologically incapable of accepting any responsibility for it. This is the response to an administration who’s own over-whelming response in the face of error has always been denial and grand-standing.

Replies from the Bush administration have been very predictable.

From President Bush:

I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” [New York Times]

Not quite true, though he might have missed the memo. In 2004 the New Orleans Times-Picayune predicted just that, as did the US Army Corps of Engineers, in “Shifting federal budget erodes protection from levees; Because of cuts, hurricane risk grows”:

“I guess people look around and think there’s a complete system in place, that we’re just out here trying to put icing on the cake,” said Mervin Morehiser, who manages the “Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity” levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers. “And we aren’t saying that the sky is falling, but people should know that this is a work in progress, and there’s more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place.”
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Naomi said this [2004] is the first time a lack of money has stopped major corps work on the levees since the project began in 1967.

“I can’t tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm,” Naomi said. “It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us.

“But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it’s important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects.”
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The Bush administration’s proposed fiscal 2005 budget includes only $3.9 million for the east bank hurricane project. Congress likely will increase that amount, although last year it bumped up the administration’s $3 million proposal only to $5.5 million.

“I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million,” Naomi said. “I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn’t get paid this year.”

They should have lived in Alaska, where in 2005 the Bush administration gave Republican Don Young over $900 million dollars to build roads and bridges, including one bridge for $600 million:

By coincidence, Young also secured $231 million for Alaska’s most-expensive project in its $1 billion “earmark” windfall: The Knik Arm Bridge, later dubbed Don Young’s Way.

The bridge would span Knik Arm — part of the Cook Inlet — and link Anchorage with Port McKenzie and the remote Mat-Su Borough. The project is estimated at $600 million total. [Seattle Times]

It seems that the US Army Corps of Engineers has been complaining about the state of the levees for some time in fact:

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t still be flooded, but I do feel that if it had been totally funded, there would be less flooding than you have,” said Michael Parker, a former Republican Mississippi congressman who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from October 2001 until March 2002, when he was ousted after publicly criticizing a Bush administration proposal to cut the corps’ budget.

A corps plan to shore up the levees began in 1965 and was supposed to be finished in 10 years but remains incomplete. “They’ve never put enough money in to complete it,” Parker said. He complained that the corps’ budget has been regularly targeted by the White House because public works projects are perceived as pork and aren’t considered “sexy.” [Chicago Tribune]

But Bush isn’t the only one issuing denials and looking to white-wash. Department of Homeland security Secretary Michael Chertoff follows suit with this while on “Meet the Press”:

…there is nobody who has ever seen or dealt with a catastrophe on this scale in this country. It has never happened before. So no matter what the planning was in advance, we were presented with an unprecedented situation. Obviously, we’re going to want to learn about that. I’ll tell you something I said when I–a month ago before this happened. I said that I thought that we need to build a preparedness capacity going forward that we have not yet succeeded in doing. That clearly remains the case, and we will in due course look at what we’ve done here and incorporate it into the planning.
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It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city. I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise. [MSNBC]

The scary thing is: his very job description - it’s right there in his title - is the security of his homeland, which right now is looking not very secure what-so-ever, by any stretch of the imagination.

Chertoff continues:

…the way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials. The federal government comes in and supports those officials. That’s why Mike Brown [the head of FEMA] got on TV on Saturday and he told people to start to get out of there.”

In other words: faced with the most devastating hurricane the American south has seen since 1990 the official Federal position is to sit back and wait until someone else officially asks for help, and then come in and offer support. Should it really be necessary for the mayor of a city that effectively no longer exists to have to ask the most powerful government in the world to step up and help before they get around to doing so?

In other news we have people like Barbara Bush, wife of ex-President Bush senior, who seems to think that perhaps the flooding was a good thing for the poor people of New Orleans:

Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, “This is working very well for them.”
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Then she added: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

She’s afraid that the poor people will want to stay in her state, and she thinks that somehow they’re benefitting from having everything they and there relatives and ancestors have spent their lives trying to accomplish destroyed overnight, from being displaced, from losing everything they’ve had. The magnitude of this sort of ignorance is staggering.

This is about the point in this tirade where I’d make a remark about fiddling while Rome burns, but Gawker has done such a nice job of it instead, courtesy Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

According to Drudge, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has recently enjoyed a little Broadway entertainment. And Page Six reports that she’s also working on her backhand with Monica Seles. So the Gulf Coast has gone all Mad Max, women are being raped in the Superdome, and Rice is enjoying a brief vacation in New York. We wish we were surprised.

What does surprise us: Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman.

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