Monday morning papers are condemning Bush. In the NY Times, Bob Herbert titled his column
A failure of leadership and writes:
"Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"
More heaping servings of blame after the flip.
Herbert's piece then proceeds with a scathing indictment of the MISERABLE FAILURE living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world...
...Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.
The president didn't seem to notice.
Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces.
Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to notice.
Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.
Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days, the president of the United States didn't seem to notice.
He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible....
...Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.
And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.
Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.
That was just the first course of the blame buffet prepared for Bush today. Paul Krugman's piece in the NY Times today is titled, Killed by contempt:
Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I'm not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized...
...the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?
...Several recent news analyses on FEMA's sorry state have attributed the agency's decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security, whose prime concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in focus misses a crucial part of the story.
For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA's preparedness programs.
You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.
But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh's successor.
Mr. Brown had no obvious qualifications, other than having been Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate. But Mr. Brown was made deputy director of FEMA; The Boston Herald reports that he was forced out of his previous job, overseeing horse shows. And when Mr. Allbaugh left, Mr. Brown became the agency's director. The raw cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the effects on staff morale.
That contempt, as I've said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.
The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren't caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?
The Washington Post also served up blame for Bush. Eugene Robinson's piece, titled Third World Scenes describes what he saw on the ground in New Orleans:
The wretched shelters at the Superdome and the convention center were finally emptied this weekend, so the last place you could really grasp the enormity of what happened here was the airport.
You thought you were in Haiti or Angola, not the United States, and you understood why so many of the people who survived the past week are filled with exhausted rage.
On the lower level, where normally you would come to meet an arriving flight, thousands of people stood in a ragged line, wearing and carrying all they had in this world. I saw maybe a few dozen whites; all the rest were black. It was one of those Third World lines that goes nowhere for a long time, then lurches forward, then backs up, then stalls again. Hundreds of rifle-toting soldiers were there to keep order, but no one had the inclination or energy for disorder...
...I met John Mullen III, a retired schoolteacher who told me how he came to be in that line. Mullen, who is African American, lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, an almost all-black neighborhood. He was in bed when the levee failed and the fast-rising water woke him up. "By the time I could walk across the room, it went from here," and he indicated mid-calf, "to here," he said, raising his hand to mid-thigh.
He and the rest of his family somehow made it out of the house and saw that a neighbor's boat had floated loose, so they and others managed to grab hold, 18 people in all. "We paddled over to Martin Luther King Elementary School, where I used to teach," he said. As they passed houses at the roofline, he remembered seeing that "the cockroaches had climbed as high as they could, and the redfish were just snapping them up."
Rescuers guided them to a bridge and promised to come back for them but never did, so that's where they spent the night. In the morning they started walking toward the convention center, but when they got close and the water shallowed out they had to abandon the boat and all the supplies they had managed to bring. At the convention center there was no food or water. Somehow, since no one else would do it, Mullen's group ended up trying to care for two elderly Alzheimer's sufferers. "A lot of people were dying," he said. "They're still out there dying..."
..."My house is under 20 feet of water. We've lost everything."
Mullen has a schoolteacher's kindly demeanor, so it was jarring to hear him say he suspected that the levee breaks had somehow been engineered to keep the wealthy French Quarter and Garden District dry at the expense of poor black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward -- a suspicion I heard from many other black survivors. And it was surprising to hear Mullen's gentle voice turn bitter as he described the scene at the convention center, when helicopters bringing food didn't even land and the soldiers "just pushed the food out like we were in the Third World. That's what made people go off. They just pushed it at us."
On the way out, I literally stumbled into the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was just finishing a visit to the airport. He looked genuinely shaken. The line he used for the television cameras was practiced -- "This looks like the hold of a slave ship" -- but there was no way to practice the horror in his eyes.
The Washington Post serves up more, with Joel Achenblog's piece, titled Race and Katrina, pulls no punches:
Katrina has become a story about race in America. Most affluent and semi-affluent Americans rarely see poor people -- they live on the other side of town. The poor of the Deep South, largely black, haven't been front and center in American consciousness since the 1960s. Katrina has changed that...
...There are many types of racism, including the type that says there's no racism in America anymore, and the situation would be precisely the same if the victims all looked like Macauley Culkin. Then there's institutional racism: We have to ask whether the government would have been better prepared for this sort of situation in New Orleans if the most vulnerable communities hadn't been, for the most part, black neighborhoods...
Meanwhile, the New Orleans Times-Picayune serves up blame through graphic eyewitness accounts. One story is that of Dr. Kevin Stephens:
Perhaps it's the stench that Dr. Kevin Stephens will remember the most.
It was a stench that was a gumbo of human waste, sweat, and despair.
For four days, Stephens, the Health Department director in New Orleans, administered to the sick in the Superdome, his primary patients being those in wheelchairs and nonambulatory. He watched conditions deteriorate from one of calmness on the eve of Hurricane Katrina crippling the city, to one of frustration by the time he was evacuated to the adjacent New Orleans Arena on Wednesday. He was taken to Baton Rouge on Thursday.
"I would not have even asked my dog to live in there," Stephens said Sunday in the shadows of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center at LSU, where the conditions inside were infinitely more stable than those he left behind in New Orleans.
"On Sunday, everything was fine, we had electricity, water and air conditioning," Stephens said. "On Monday, we lost electricity. By Tuesday the water was coming in through the holes in the roof, the electricity and air conditioning were off and toilets were beginning to back up. People were getting frustrated."
Stephens said he was aware of the water continuing to rise outside the Dome, but he was uncertain as to whether most of the evacuees knew. By then, however, the sliver of light filtering in through the two holes left in the Dome's mammoth roof courtesy of Katrina was that of despair, not of hope.
"I never felt threatened and I walked around the entire place," Stephens said. "I was talking to people, administering first aid. But people were ready to get out of there. The conditions were horrid and horrible. The stench was unbearable. If we had electricity, it would have been so much better..."
In another story, continuing rescue efforts are detailed:
...74-year-old Gloria Galway wasn't budging from her second-floor apartment in the B.W. Cooper public housing complex, despite six feet of water lapping at her building and a rescue boat ready to take her in.
"I got food, water, my two dogs and my Bible," Galway told the rescue team. "God will take care of me."
After pleading with Galway for five minutes, Hamilton "Ham" Peterson said, "I'm going in."
He trudged through the water, climbed to Galway's apartment and told her, "God sent us to get you."
Galway emerged with her dogs, purse and cane, joining hundreds of other New Orleans residents who were ferried from the homes and apartments Sunday, hemmed in for six days by disease infested water. The unprecedented search-and-rescue operation took on an increased urgency as police, soldiers, game wardens, and other volunteers met with occasional resistance and even gunfire. But most of the time, they found grateful victims....
... On the way to the Cooper development, better known as The Calliope, a few residents waved off the rescuers. Capt. Timothy Bayard, who is commanding the operation, said the orders were to pick up only those willing to go.
"If they want to die, there is nothing I can do,'' Bayard said. "I can't fight them, they may tip the boat. But if I get an order later to pull them out by force, I'll do it."
A flatboat with Peterson, McMahen and a reporter met no resistance at 3508 Thalia St.
"How many do you have?" Peterson yelled to the woman leaning out of the second-story window.
"We have the two of us, four kids and grandma," 35-year-old Michelle Gibson yelled back.
One by one, Gibson and her husband walked the children downstairs, through the knee-deep water and into the boat.
"I told mama the police were gonna save us," 7-year-old Arteniasha said. "But I wasn't gonna get in no helicopter..."
Peterson, who once lived in New Orleans and now lives in Washington, said as soon as he saw the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina unfold on television, he knew he had to be part of the rescue effort...
...Part of his motivation, he said, was the loss of his father and mother-in-law on Flight 93 in the terrorist attacks of 9-11.
"It is all about family and the absence of family and the preciousness of family,'' he said. "Whether it is the World Trade Center or this neighborhood, when I saw the mamas and babies suffering on TV, I knew I had to come and I knew I had to be on the ground helping people."
Peterson, who once served a stint as a Washington, D.C., cop, carried a revolver. But Calliope rescuers met no armed resistance Sunday. Just confounding pockets of resistance to being saved.
Bayard vowed the operation will continue until everybody is out. "Because the next operation will be pulling out bodies,'' he said.
When Peterson helped deposit Galway next to the bus that will take her to a shelter, he helped her with her meager belongings. Then he handed her one last item he grabbed from a table as he rushed from her apartment: Galway's deteriorating paperback Bible.
"Bless you,'' she said.