Miserable Failure: Bush Administration Totally Disengaged on Katrina

I’ve been tagging del.icio.us links with this phrase today: RhetoricOfFailure. In fact, I bundled it together with a lot of other terms, like “CorruptRepublicans” and “SmirkingBastards” and “anti-truth.” Because every time I read a news item about something that didn’t go so well lately for the current Administration, I tag it and add it to the growing linkslist of failures. .

I’ll be adding a new tag to the bundle: “Disengaged.” I just ran across this article from Boing Boing, and began sobbing helplessly at the needless loss of life and property because a bunch of elected and appointed officials at the highest and middling-highest levels were “disengaged.” There was no leadership. There was no co-ordination. There was no one culprit. But there is one man who has never taken responsibility, and who never will, because to admit error is to admit that he’s not infallible.

Yeah, you know who I mean.

I think I’ve become a political Sedevacantist: the White House is nice, but there’s nobody home.

However, he’ s not alone in his failures. His minions failed to bring him bad news, preferring as always to bring him only good and uplifting news (and doing a heckuva good job, too). People on the “other side” failed, in various ways, too. The catastrophic failure that was Katrina (and to a lesser extent, Rita) holds both sides up to an unflattering light – one of very few truly bi-partisan issues in a long time.

Mayor Ray Nagin let his people down by not making sure that emergency plans that were discussed were actually in place, and the City of New Orleans (maybe due to bureacratic bungling or corruption) failed to make sure that requested emergency supplies were laid in at fire stations, and they sure failed to make use of every kind of transportation to get the carless poor the hell out of the Big Easy.

Governor Blanco maybe didn’t scream loud enough; she’s not mentioned by name in the story, and she did try to get the word out to the Feds in the prescribed manner so that the Big Damn Federal Emergency Powers would be triggered. Oh, that reminds me, if you’ve never heard This American Life, there’s something on ThisLife.orgyou should track down. I’ll try to link it at the bottom of the post.

Other local government bodies weren’t ready and were totally overwhelmed, anyway.

But the main culprits are the people in charge of this country, and they were totally disengaged. And now it appears that the White House received an email advising that the levee had broken at midnight Monday. But the next morning, their spokesman was “taken by surprise” when they supposedly received official confirmation on Tuesday.

No one was completely in charge, and the one man on site in New Orleans for FEMA had to hitch a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter to go out Monday afternoon to see if the rumored levee break was for real. It was, and he called his superior at 8pm that night. I guess he didn’t feel he could jump the chain of command, because, of course, he had not been given the local authority to pull the trigger on the emergency powers. He tried. He spoke to Michael Brown at 8pm Monday night, and Brownie then said “I am now going to call the White House.”

Instead, emails went from FEMA to Homeland Security. Brownie declined to tell investigators whether he called and if he did, who he spoke with. After a mysterious delay, someone from Homeland Securty sent an “FYI” memo, finally.

The White House didn’t get the email (which was bundled with a lot of other emails) until midnight. I guess nobody wanted to wake the President, who was off in Crawford sawing logs (in one way or another). Cheney was in Wyoming fishing, and Rove was… where exactly? Oh, yes, at the President’s side, mostly. The chief of staff was in Maine, but deputy chief Rove wears the pants in the family and should have been point person. But he didn’t really start organizing and directing until it was time to manage the political fallout.

Here’s the article that set me off. Read the whole thing, and then see if you don’t feel like it’s time to throw the bastards out.

New York Times: White House knew of levee’s failure on night of storm

White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports.

But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet,” he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.

The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an “all hands on deck” alarm, the investigators have found.

This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history.

I sobbed when I read this story, because it finally brought home to me the fact that our so-called leaders really don’t care about any of us, especially if we happen to be poor and black. The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are, apparently, expendable. This means by extension, that we’re all expendable in their eyes, because all Americans who are not rich, white, politically connected Republicans are expendable. Our so-called leaders speak… only now it’s called “spin.”

They were completely “disengaged.” They are complete “morons.” And all their explanations and refusals to get into “The Blame Game” and the anti-truths they insert in the news are just “The Rhetoric of Failure.” Because nothing is going to get done, and more time will be wasted, and all too soon it’ll be hurricane season again. And then again the year after that, and our miserable failure of a “President” will still be in power.

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

We are spirits in the material world

Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail you
The subjugate the meek
But it’s the rhetoric of failure

We are spirits in the material world

UPDATE: The Washington Post’s article on Michael Brown’s testimony in Congress includes a video link to watch.

iTunes: The Police: Spirits in the Material World: Ghost in the Machine (Remastered) [2:58]

iTunes: Ira Glass: This American Life: After the Flood: [59:16]

Technorati Tags: Miserable Failure, Disengaged, Katrina, Morons, Heckuva Job Brownie