New Liberalism

The President's words that should be giving people the most heartburn are the ones he used to end his press conference:

“It -- for those who have not -- trying to conceive what we're talking about, it's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by a -- the worst kind of weapon you can imagine. And now we're going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world.”

Precisely. The damage in New Orleans is not all that different from what a catastrophic terrorist attack on the city would have looked like. What if a bomb had blown up the levees and the city had filled with water in a moment’s notice? Would the response have been this incoherent? Didn’t we, after 11 September 2001, create an entire department of government precisely for responding to terrorist attacks both in terms of prevention and response? Remember, in 2002, FEMA was rolled into Homeland Security. Which begs the question: What on earth have people in Homeland Security been doing for the last 2 years?

To be fair, the same question should be posed to the leaders of every major city in the United States, and to every governor. After 9/11, it would have been inexcusable for city and state governments not to study evacuation plans for their major cities. And yet that is what happened, apparently, in New Orleans. But the Federal Government didn’t do any better, and heads are going to need to roll. Make no mistake: we have given our government extraordinary resources and authorized extraordinary powers in the last few years to deal with scenarios just like this one, and our government has failed us completely.

# posted by Mayflower @ 6:37 AM