laying Politics" - that's what they claim. Listen to many  of the voices of the far right talkshow hosts on radio. Question, criticize or even suggest better ways to handle the true disaster faced by so many hundreds of thousands of the people of New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana and Mississippi, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and, by their estimation, you must be some left wing jerk who hates this country. They'll claim you have "an agenda" (That's something that most Democrats have in their attempt to lead this country astray). Nonsense, dishonest and ignorant, but that's what turns on their dwindling audiences. I'd like your reaction to this thought; if we had any other form of government, Bush would by now have been ousted from office. The senior members of his party would have told him to step aside.  We have a chief executive who, early on, claimed that he was "satisfied with the response" his administration had made to Hurricane Katrina. He praised the utterly inept head of FEMA, Michael Brown. Brown said that Katrina was a category 4 hurricane that "caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it 2 years ago." It certainly hasn't appeared that they had done the correct planning for this category 5 event.
Go back just a few years to the Clinton administration when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was run by James Lee Witt. It was he who said "In the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby. These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn't look like it was."
The endless list of FEMA's failings is in no way intended to criticize the invaluable and heroic work of the individuals for whom this is their life's work.
But, the leadership!
Some examples.
Wal-Mart delivered trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back claiming they were not needed.
FEMA decided to stop the Red Cross from sending in supplies and medical personnel into New Orleans.
There was not one busload of refugees bused out of the City of New Orleans, or the state of Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina hit.
The list can be almost without end, but to give you just a couple more examples of the government's bureaucratic foul-up. When Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago offered help to FEMA before the hurricane, they said "No."
During the presidential debates of 2000, George W. Bush told his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes are "a time to test your mettle."
If you look at the first five days subsequent to the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast, he was tested and failed in most all respects. Perhaps you watched him being interviewed by Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America"; he appeared ill-informed and almost flippant with some of his answers.
They are just beginning to get it - to understand. What do you say to a man like Michael Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, who  said that the disaster "exceeded the foresight of the planners and maybe anybody's foresight." What nonsense.
On 9/11 four years ago, most will accept the fact that George W. Bush emerged from the attacks with very high poll ratings for his leadership and decisiveness. Not this time. His speeches have been lackluster and uninspiring. When the terrorists attacked, Bush was slow to react and he was portrayed as weak and indecisive. But once he got to  ground-zero in Manhattan that was where he made his mark. He still has time in his second term to restore his stature... but I very much doubt he has what it takes.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall, say, three months from now when at the cabinet level they ponder such questions as "what do we wish we had done."
It has been arranged that, barring some new urgency, one of the people I'll be interviewing tomorrow  is James Lee Witt, the former much respected leader of FEMA. He's right there on the ground in Louisiana.