[« More selachophobia nightmares....] [More humor from MadKane.... »]
09/01/2005: Unfortunately, we won't see any accountability....
since Dumbya thinks his "accountability moment" was last November.
Josh Marshall is doing some good posts at Talking Points Memo about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This one bears some serious thought:
I've still heard conflicting reports about how many of the levees were breached as opposed to overtopped, which is very different, if we're considering these issues of maintaining the levees and such. The president told Diane Sawyer this morning that: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." So clearly he has no idea what he's talking about. Or perhaps his disaster preparedness folks did his interview prep too. Or maybe he's just trying again to fool the people he's sworn to serve. Shades of Condi. Perhaps we'll get another civil engineer version of Richard Clarke coming forward.And from one of Josh's readers, we get a most excellent observation:
In any case, we can understand the magnitude of this event and hold the administration to account for its lack of preparation. One doesn't cancel out the other, as much as the president and his defenders might want them to.
And one final point.
We're hearing again and again now that there just wasn't enough money for a lot of this stuff. Terrorism was our big focus. Some kinds of preparedness aren't simply a question of funds. They turn on less elastic resources. But most of what we're hearing about is dollars and planning. So when we hear, 'well, there just wasn't enough for this and terrorism', or 'we needed the money for Iraq', the real answer is 'nice try'.
The president cut taxes every year of his first term in office. He's trying to push through a major tax cut right now. So it's not terrorism that took away the money. It was tax cuts. And to a degree, same thing for Iraq.
Choices have consequences. And bad consequences require accountability.
I have a question that no one has raised so far. Wouldn’t part of any homeland security preparation be the handling of refugees? Virtually any serious terrorist attack (explosion, nuclear, biological) would entail a large number of displaced persons. Wasn’t anything done along these lines? I would have thought we would have pre-positioned refugee resources (tents, MRE's, water purification, generators, emergency medical care) near major population centers in the event of mass exodus. Am I crazy?If you think Bush has fucked up things now... just wait til that next terrorist attack. And remember the dopey look on his face as his aids interrupted his reading of "The Pet Goat" to tell him that the United States was under attack....
Len on 09.01.05 @ 12:22 PM CST
