First off, unless you have helped or seen the people who have been effected by Katrina face to face, you have no room to make this whole ordeal a political issue. It has only been what, almost two weeks since it happened? What is wrong with everyone?! Stop complaining, you still have your house. I am sure the last thing on these people’s minds is whether or not President Bush responded quickly enough. Most of them just want to know if their children or parents are alive. Yet we as Americans turn around and immediately make the issue political. You have idiots writing columns about it already. Why not get out there and do something productive with the resources that you have? There is still a need in places where these people are being evacuated to. We still need baby food and baby clothes here and we just aren’t getting it. I guess people are too busy pointing fingers.
That’s just like Americans though, isn’t it; It isn’t my fault, it’s his. We never want to take responsibility for what we do wrong. Yet, no one who is making the comments that they are making seems to realize the way federal aid works and the current confusion that is hurting the whole operation.
I sat in a briefing today with the Red Cross and all of those in charge sounded completely frustrated with the way the military was handling the transportation of people. It is very hard for a relief organization to have some form of controlled chaos when they do not know where people or supplies are going. The Lubbock Coliseum was to receive 500+ evacuees on Sunday. The planes never came. Weather and some confusion kept them in New Orleans. Yesterday, Labor Day, the planes again, were supposed to come, but they never showed up. The military re-routed them to Chicago temporarily because of confusion on the ground. Do you see what I am getting at?
Federal Aid can only be brought in after the local authorities, that would be the mayor and police chief of New Orleans for those of you having difficulty keeping up, and the governor or Louisiana have declared a state of emergency. Did either of those two things take place quickly? No.
The mayor of New Orleans faultered right off the bat by not requesting federal help immediately after the evacuation order was given. Had he done so, the government could have stepped in and supplied large military trucks to haul people in. Hmmm, seems a lot easier than picking people off of roofs. The President alone cannot make these decisions though! There has to be a chain, it’s the way it has to happen.
There was a slight delay, I think it was four hours or so, between when the President was told of the devestation and when the state of emergency was issued. Is that the fault of the President, yes, more than likely he was in meetings discussing the best possible solutions.
Don’t give me this crap about how he was in Crawford and yada, yada, yada. Do you know exactly what was going on in Crawford? No! You have no idea. The President has worked from there before, and hey, it’s closer to New Orleans than Washington D.C. I still do not understand what people expected, President Bush to somehow stop the levees from breaching, I mean, that’s saying he’s like super man or something, almost like a compliment.
I’ll end this whole rant by saying, please, stop making this a political issue for now. People are still suffering and dying, there’s no need to attack someone. Just wait till the water recedes and people can go back, then you can yell “foul” all you want. People are looking for any little thing to just go all out on the President, yet they seem to know very little about the situation. They assume from wherever they are that they know exactly how these people feel. I’ve sat and talked to some of them and I still do not understand it. Some have lost everything they own yet they sit there and smile because their family made it and that’s all they wanted.
[EDIT]
At least a few reporters have done their research and see that it’s not a single person’s fault and that a lot went wrong.