Tomorrow's the
big smack-down in the Big Easy... If you're there, who are you voting for?
If you're only a New Orleanian in spirit, who do you think can best build some levees, clean up the trash, rebuild the lower ninth ward, bake beignets, pour some hurricanes, and "Laissez les Bon Temps Roulez"?
And just for the record, please note that
Chris Matthews is an idiot. He moderated the last mayoral debate on Tuesday, and just doesn't get it:
"They're going to think it's crazy," Matthews said at one point, referring to citizens outside New Orleans and their view of using federal tax money to reconstruct a city below sea level.
The slate of questions -- often more like accusations -- seemed geared to a national audience, which Matthews suggested largely opposed the rebuilding of the city, or at least blame local politicians for the bungled, plodding post-Katrina rescue and rebuilding efforts. Only occasionally did the moderators' questions elicit differences between the candidates that might matter to local voters.
At one point Matthews sparred with Landrieu, for instance, on the question of whether the federal government bears responsibility for the failed levee system, which has been under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers for nearly 80 years.
"Nobody out there thinks the problems are with the levees," Matthews asserted, but rather with corrupt local officials.
He then called the political history of Landrieu's family a "legacy of inaction," naming his father the former mayor and his sister the U.S. senator.
"The Corps of Engineers designed and engineered the levees. It's a federal responsibility. You can't put that off on the people of New Orleans," Landrieu shot back. "So you're pushing this off on the federal government then," Matthews said. "If it's all federal, why would you want to be mayor?"
Harry Shearer on Huffpo critiques Matthews
here, and provides lots of background info on why the Army Corps of Engineers deserves much of the blame, referring to this
piece in the WashPo:
...Pentagon investigators, the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Sciences were documenting the agency's ecologically disastrous, economically dubious, politically inspired water projects.
Then the Corps failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, despite spending more in Louisiana than in any other state. Last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency's "design failure" led to the floodwall collapses that drowned New Orleans. So why isn't everyone asking questions about the Corps and its patrons in Congress?
Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection
See, guess what, it is a Federal issue, after all.