A follow up to being held accountable, interview with Nagin

[Biggy]

Here he shows his frustration for a lack of action by the higher ups. This man is a true leader, he warned his people, he didn't get the proper back up IMO.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/nagin.transcript/index.html

I couldn't paste it in here, sorry, but it gives you an idea straight from the man's mouth.

[Biggy]

from the mayor's mouth himself..

"WWL: Well, you and I must be in the minority. Because apparently there's a section of our citizenry out there that thinks because of a law that says the federal government can't come in unless requested by the proper people, that everything that's going on to this point has been done as good as it can possibly be.

NAGIN: Really?

WWL: I know you don't feel that way.

NAGIN: Well, did the tsunami victims request? Did it go through a formal process to request?

You know, did the Iraqi people request that we go in there? Did they ask us to go in there? What is more important?

And I'll tell you, man, I'm probably going get in a whole bunch of trouble. I'm probably going to get in so much trouble it ain't even funny. You probably won't even want to deal with me after this interview is over.

WWL: You and I will be in the funny place together.

NAGIN: 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.

You know, I'm not one of those drug addicts. I am thinking very clearly.

And I don't know whose problem it is. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem. I don't know whether it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now. "

[*KK*]

If i were Ray Nagin, I'd be fit to be tied right now, and past the boiling point since about Tuesday night or so.

[JoesHO]

Yeah the situation has been totally mismanaged and Bush is at the core with his policy from early on and after thhe the storm too

[Rolo]

I do not think Bush have been personally involved with the mismanagement after the storm - his words about it "not being good enough" sounds like someone he had trusted fucked up. I would even suspect that things have first started to happen after the massive critique by people from the highest place.

Ofcourse you could say that by Bush not personally taking action from day 1, then he have fucked up... and looking back I have to agree with that - Bush was the president of the USA when the storm hit, and he failed as a leader. If he had been employed by me, he had been fired - along with all of the other politicians who used this a way to blame the war in Iraq for the problems!

It was incompetence that made this clusterfuck blow up...

[melody]

Bush slashed 44% of the FEMA budget for New Orleans, the majority of which was to go into improvements on the levee. Bush knew from 2001 this scenario might play itself out.

George Bush is to blame, not that he'll accept the blame...him being a big fan of "personal responsibility" and all.

[PornoDoggy]

Bush is not to blame for the fact that supplies of X did not reach point Y by hour Z. Bush did appoint the people who are.

I'm not even sure that Bush cuts to the levy program over the past five/six budgets can be considered part of the problem. Some of the levies replaced/restructured after the Mississippi/Missouri River Basin floods of 1993 were completed THIS YEAR, so the impact of monies diverted from budgets during the "Bush Era" probably wouldn't have done much to reduce the scale of this disaster.

The biggest failure - and one that will probably be lost amidst all the shouting, because you actually have to THINK to understand it - is that, in the aftermath of 9/11, this is an absolute DISGRACE. God help us if a terrorist attack under this administration does hit us - if this is how they respond, we’re flat-out fucked.

[Carrie]

The biggest failure - and one that will probably be lost amidst all the shouting, because you actually have to THINK to understand it - is that, in the aftermath of 9/11, this is an absolute DISGRACE. God help us if a terrorist attack under this administration does hit us - if this is how they respond, we’re flat-out fucked.
We did have a terrorist attack under this administration, and it proved to be one of the most shining examples of humanity the country's ever seen.

Then you've got this... and it's the singlemost shining example of inhumanity ever seen. Fucking 7yr old children being raped and murdered in the Superdome... kids and women being ripped away from their families inside that hellhole to be dragged off and gang-raped for hours... I think about my little 7yr old guy sleeping safe in his bed right now, all innocence and spitfire, and how that could have been him, and something inside of me just rages and weeps both at the same time. I want death, I want justice... I want those poor children to be okay... but it's too late...

It comes down to the people, somehow. The humans - ? I wouldn't even call those animals that. The people of New York rose to the occasion, the people of New Orleans sunk into the deepest depravity imaginable.

And I can't help thinking it would've been just as bad, or worse, if there had been food and water inside the Dome. Then the gangs would've been killing people for food as well as killing them for sex. Having little 4 and 6 month old babies dying of starvation is unthinkable enough, imagine having some kind of material thing that those animals wanted and they're willing to kill you right in front of your family to take it from you.

I dunno, PD. There's a lot of major fuck-ups all along many chains of command in this situation, but I can't stop coming back to how the people themselves didn't have to dissolve into this level of barbarism.

[PornoDoggy]

Nobody is defending the level of barbarism that some people reportedly descended to, Carrie. That does not excuse the fact that it's taken this long to begin major efforts to restore order - control the animals - and rescue the people from them.

You cannot compare the two situations very well - the attack in NY was isolated to a very small geographic area, the "attack" on NO was total. Yet even in NY, apparently, some of the heroic first defenders occupied themselves with appropriating a fire truck full of designer jeans before the building came down on their heads. I hate to think about what would have happened had the terrorists succeeded in isolating Manhattan from the rest on NY for a period of a number of days.

FEMA's response in NY was phenomenal. FEMA's response in NO has been spectacularly the opposite. It should not suprise anyone - FEMA's been run for several years by cronies without experience in disaster relief, and involved in the beauracratic shuffle related to the spawning of the Department of Homeland Security.

Again - no one is defending the hooligans, thugs, whatever you want to call them. They exist. We all know they exist. It should not have taken this long to restore the "thin blue line" between them and the rest of the folks.

[Dravyk]

FEMA's response in NY was phenomenal. FEMA's response in NO has been spectacularly the opposite. It should not suprise anyone - FEMA's been run for several years by cronies without experience in disaster relief, and involved in the beauracratic shuffle related to the spawning of the Department of Homeland Security.
Everything there is right on target!

And what does that say? A pre-Bush government handled 911 better than all of the changes put in afterward. What kind of irony-slash-stupidity does that reveal? That all the changes put forth after 911 to beef everything up has made a total cluster fuck out of it all!! And what was there before worked better.

Hmm. Buck stops at Bush. Period.

[Raven]

Response time to the Tsunami was more organised than this.

Personally, I have no idea how I would react to a disaster of these proportions, having, thankfully, never lived through anything like this. Hell, I get scared during a 5.4 earthquake and everyone laughs at me. When the winds go over 50 miles an hour, I'm looking to leave....so...I have nothing with which I can relate..

And, there will always be the cruel, the unthinking, the barbaric...I chalk that up to poor protoplasm and miswired genetics......

It still goes back to the resources this country has. New York had shame, too, in the aftermath of 911...in my head, I can't compare the two. Waking up in the morning to watch jets fly into two monuments is a little different than watching the path of a Hurricane..and seeing it ramp up from Cat 1 to Cat 5.....knowing that NO is below sea level....There was time to organise and mobilise.....and prepare...

Hmm. Buck stops at Bush. Period. - Agreed.

[Dravyk]

Waking up in the morning to watch jets fly into two monuments is a little different than watching the path of a Hurricane..and seeing it ramp up from Cat 1 to Cat 5.....knowing that NO is below sea level....There was time to organise and mobilise.....and prepare...Exactly. Something no one expected was handled a milltion times better than something a) people have been saying for years would happen, b) which has a history based on geography of this type of event happening (at different levels of course) and c) then just the recent notice before the hurricane hit.

The response between the two is staggering. And to think this one happened after the other ... again, at the risk of repeating, the only difference is emergency services organized before and after Bush took over.

Let the conservative knights of the GOP come running in now and tell me what a wonderful job Dubya is doing. As Melody said the other day, Nero fiddled, Bush strummed the guitar in Texas.

[Raven]

Exactly. Something no one expected was handled a milltion times better than something a) people have been saying for years would happen, b) which has a history based on geography of this type of event happening (at different levels of course) and c) then just the recent notice before the hurricane hit.

The response between the two is staggering. And to think this one happened after the other ... again, at the risk of repeating, the only difference is emergency services organized before and after Bush took over.

Let the conservative knights of the GOP come running in now and tell me what a wonderful job Dubya is doing. As Melody said the other day, Nero fiddled, Bush strummed the guitar in Texas.

Hey now.....Bush dipped his plane on his way back from vacation...what more do you want, she said, dripping with sarcasm. :)