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poking intellectual holes in the lid of your simplicity

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Quote Of The Day:

"The primary failure on Bush's part was very poor PR and not using his position to push hard for relief in a way that was visible to the public."

-Eric at Eric's Grumbles (in the comment section of this post).

Turns out that the president's complete non-response over a five day period wasn't the problem. Allowing tens of thousands of people to rot wasn't the problem. What exactly did Bush do wrong? He was camera shy. Aw, poor guy. However, it's understandable. I think we all know what a humble person Bush is, right? He's never been into that whole PR thing.




posted by Samwick @ 12:02 PM  

23 Comments:

  • At 12:28 PM, Blogger Mindwyrm said…

    Did you see the questions he posted for you on the "How about some answers" post that you commented on? I'd be interested to see your response.

     

  • At 12:31 PM, Blogger Samwick said…

    Hi mindwyrm. I did see those, we've gone into a fairly lengthy debate there. But to summarize, I'm not into simply blaming Bush. I think local and state officials share a huge portion of the blame, as well as citizens. I'm just, at Eric's site, focusing on Bush since everyone there seems to be so determined to let him off the hook. He, to my mind, was an absentee president last week. Anyway, thanks for the comment.

     

  • At 12:34 PM, Blogger Robert said…

    Matt: Allowing tens of thousands of people to rot wasn't the problem.

    Apparently I was wrong. When I read that same idea (albeit worded a little differently) in your comment at Eric’s blog, I thought that surely you must have misspoken. Is there anything—in your estimation—that the government should not do…other than wage war and reduce tax rates? At what point are individuals responsible for the consequences of their decisions?

     

  • At 12:43 PM, Blogger Samwick said…

    Fair question. I think it's entirely possible for citizens to BOTH make their own decisions and, when circumstances are out of their control, ask for help. What's wrong with simply helping people caught up in a catastrophic natural disaster? On Eric's site, quite a few people have said things like "Hey, if people decided to stay, the consequences are their fault". I'm just not comfortable playing mind reader like this. I'm not comfortable lumping 500,000 people into a single category...who know's why so many people stayed? Rather than make HUGE assumptions about why people stayed, I'd rather see us help them as quickly as possible and sort out the details later. We could have saved thousands of lives if we had acted more quickly.

     

  • At 1:17 PM, Blogger Robert said…

    The fact is that it really doesn’t matter why they stayed behind; that they stayed is the product of thousands of individual decisions. And while I completely understand your sense of compassion, how you surmise that Bush is primarily at fault is perplexing.

     

  • At 9:11 PM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    But Matt, it didn't start last week. People have been trying to prevent this disaster from happening for ages. Bush cut the funding so he could pay for the mess he created in Iraq. The corps of engineers were going to do work, I guess on the levies, and they cut the funding.

    These people who have died and suffering are just more "collateral damage" in our "war on terror."

    Now certainly Bush makes appointments, and you have to wonder why this guy who is running FEMA is in charge, but set all that aside. This never had to happen. It's not an issue of how well Bush was at damage control.

    When you divert a nation's funding into a pointless war, then choices are made. Lenin once said that he did not need to attack America that eventually we would self destruct from self neglect. That's what this is about.

    It's about funding being cut from things so that we can murder people abroad to make some oilmen wealthy here.

    I was talking to my parents this evening about charitable contributions. I asked my mom if perhaps she could make a whopping contribution and write it off her taxes.

    She tells me that whereas people used to be able to write charitable contributions off their taxes completely, the republicans who always say that charity should replace government assistance have changed the laws so that if you donate to charities, only a small percentage can now be written off your taxes. So while they were arguing to eliminate charitable programs on the grounds that charity should be private in nature, they changed the laws to make people less likely to give to charity. We call this "compassionate conservatism." Well they do anyway.

    I call it an intentional attempt to polarize wealth, so that 95% of the nation will be indentured servants to the remaining 5% who own everything.

    My mom has some links that breakdown all the various ways that the Bush administration caused this to happen by fighting for funding cuts on what FEMA had classified one of the top 3 most likely disasters in this country. There is no excuse for this. None. It's not about how he handled the crisis. It's about how he caused it by intentionally defunding all attempts to prevent it.

     

  • At 11:36 PM, Blogger Samwick said…

    "how you surmise that Bush is primarily at fault is perplexing"

    Actually I think a lot of people failed here, a lot of people did the wrong thing. Citizens, state and local officials, as well as the president, there are plenty of folks who didn't do what they needed to. I'm just not on board with the idea that Bush somehow did the right thing. He was an absentee leader for about five days last week and that's inexcusable. But again, I'm all for holding state and local officials responsible as well.

    And thanks for the comment Shreryl, basically we're going to be finding out, over the next few months, just how at fault Bush really is. A lot of information will be coming out about how much Bush knew...and, as you say, he knew a lot, there had been warnings about this for a long time...and how he responded. State and local officials seemed to make a lot of bad decisions last week, but Bush has been making them for years now, he's got a lot of answer for.

     

  • At 3:08 AM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    Hi Matt,

    Maybe it will come out. Seems to me that Bush has been fucking up since he got in office, but the mainstream media benefits from him too much to expose any of it. I hope they see the writing on the walls this time though and rake him through the coals. Then maybe America can get back to being the country I used to love.

     

  • At 1:55 PM, Blogger Mindwyrm said…

    Sheryl, the war on Iraq had nothing to do with the levee's failing. According the the CoE the portions of the levee that failed were considered completed. Meaning any additional funds would not have gone to those parts of the levee. Additionally, in an interview on NPR a former CoE director(who was forced to resign in '01 after arguing with the White House) says there's no way you can hang the levees on Bush. The decisions for the CoE funding and what projects to work on in NO go back decades. NO is not a victim of the War on Terror at all. NO is a victim of poor emergency planning and even worse decisions by the local authorities. Neither of those is anything Bush controlled.

    If you want to rail him for picking Brown go ahead. Turns out it was a bad choice. How could you tell it was a bad choice until Brown was put in a position to succeed or fail. But you can't hang Brown's decisions on Bush. By that logic, Clinton is responsible for Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the invasion of a citizen's home to get Elian back. Clinton didn't make those decisions but someone he appointed did. I don't see those as Clinton's fault anymore than I see Brown's bungling as Bush's fault.

    Matt: I don't think Bush should get off the hook completely. I agree that he picked people who obviously couldn't get the job done, but until those people are actually put in a position like they're in now, you have no way to know if they'll succeed or not. If you look at the timeline of events and the resources the feds had allocated vs the required requests from the local authorities I think its painfully obvious that the local authorities screwed up royally. Bush's response(flyby, bad speech) were bad but they didn't get anybody killed. Nagin and Blanco's choices did.

    As for this being one of the "top 3" disasters to happen I again refer you to the interview on NPR with the CoE guys. One of them flat-out states that he understands the tradeoff that was necessary. He gets that when it came to the budget defending NO against an event that had never happened in the history of the US took much lower priority when compared to other national considerations over the last 30-40 years.

    Sheryl, you say Bush took money from FEMA. Doesn't Congress create the budget? Why aren't you yelling at the guys who actually control the purse? Also, we've been in Iraq 2 1/2 years. There is no way that a levee project to withstand a Cat 5 hurricane would have been completed in that time. Partially because the engineers aren't even sure how to build one that'll stnad up to a Cat 5 in the first place. Bush has had a bunch of screwups and I have no problem calling him on those. But the emergency prep and response aren't things that can be laid at his feet. This isn't his fault.

     

  • At 3:46 PM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    I think there's some spin going on here. You look at the Corp of Engineers website, and they are saying exactly what you are saying.

    But like they quote General Strock as saying: "Let me also address the issue of the general impact of the war in Iraq on civil works funding. We've seen some suggestions that our budget has been affected by the war. I can also say that I do not see that to be the case. If you look at the historical levels of funding for the Corps of Engineers from the pre-war levels back to 1992, '91, before we actually got into this, you'll see that the level of funding has been fairly stable throughout that period. So I think we would see that our funding levels would have dropped off if that were the case; so I do not see that as an issue that is relevant to the discussion of the flood protection of the City of New Orleans."

    If the Corps of Engineers funding has remained the same from what it was before Iraq, then the spending here in the US has to have been cut because the Corps of Engineers have played a major role in Iraq for fixing the oil refineries , the waterworks, etc. It's not as if the Corps of Engineers have not been in Iraq. They are major big time in Iraq. Talk about spin!!!!

     

  • At 4:18 PM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    I would not take any report for granted because people are protecting their and their leaders asses at this point.

     

  • At 4:57 PM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    OK Mindwyrm,

    You figure the problem is Michael Brown.

    Here's The White Houses profile on Michael Brown. I just thought maybe you could tell me based on this profile what it was that qualified Mr. Brown to have this position?

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011203-6.html

    Perhaps it was his work with the International Arabian Horse Association? Or perhaps his ties to oil? Or maybe he just has a nice smile.

     

  • At 5:48 PM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    Oh, and in terms of Congress and budgets, I believe the President submits a budget to Congress and then Congress hashes it out. I could be wrong on that, but I think that is the way it worls.

     

  • At 12:31 AM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    The History of FEMA

     

  • At 12:47 AM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    Sorry this is not consolidated, Matt. My mom just emailed me the links of articles and sites she had (I didn't realize there were more coming):

    Timeline on FEMA

    Editor and Publisher History of Funding

    I know, I know. It's not Fox News! Which means no one will read who needs to. What am I thinking?

     

  • At 12:02 PM, Blogger Mindwyrm said…

    Sheryl: the spin is out in full force by everyone. This article in the WaPo today is probably the best I've seen when it comes to illustrating the issue with CoE funding if the article is right. That was the first breakdown I'd seen of actual numbers for what CoE got funding-wise.

    In regards to the budget, you are correct that the administration submits a budget request to Congress. But Congress decides what to do then. Again, if the WaPo article is right then Bush did more for NO and the CoE then Clinton did. Should we blame Clinton then? Not a chance. In the end, regardless of any recommendations by the administration it's up to Congress to determine the actual money. The president is essentially the kid asking mom for a raise in his allowance. The mother decides whether to grant or ignore the request. Same with Congress and the Pres. The Pres. asks and Congress does their own thing.

    As for Brown, I would think that the three years overseeing emergency services in OKC would help. The two years he spent with the OK State Senate Finance Committee probably had something to do with it. The eleven years spent as either a private attorney or General Counsel probably helped. And he'd was General Counsel for FEMA for seven months and Acting Deputy Director already for two months.

    To be fair to Brown though, I'm starting to wonder how bad of a job he did as I see more and more about the assets FEMA had ready to go. Especially when you consider the FEMA response to other disasters, such as Hurricane Charley, where Brown was in charge of FEMA as well. I'd like to blame FEMA being part of DHS but it was part of DHS during Charley as well. We really do have to wait and see what all the information says but as it stands now, I think the vast majority of the screwups were at the local level and then compounded by Brown's mistakes at the Fed level. I still don't see anything that Bush could have done differently that would have made a difference.

    I did read your links by the way. Here's another timeline for ya that, IMO, is a bit more pertinent to whether or not FEMA did it's job. Oh wait, it's not from MoveOn.org so no one who need to read it will. silly me. ;)

     

  • At 12:17 PM, Blogger Mindwyrm said…

    See Sheryl, you're not the only one who can't get everything in one post. :)

    If this ends up being legit, I see more than a few people calling for Blanco's head.

     

  • At 5:26 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I wonder if by "very poor PR," Eric means the incident when Bush's helicopter photo delayed actual relief efforts for hours. How many people need to die for better PR?

     

  • At 2:11 AM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    Mindwyrm,

    Granted it says that Bush's requests were "slightly higher" than Clinton's requests for the previous 5 years, but then the wetlands have been receding over that period of time (getting worse each year), so the need for more spending would have increased in recent years as well.

    My mom was telling me about some major flood they had in the area back in 1926 that also wiped out a lot of poor people. It didn't affect New Orleans at all though because New Orleans was not below sea level at that time, so you have to be careful about comparing expenditures if you go too far back in time.

    For example, there's probably been some inflation in Bush's term. Like if you want to move materials, you are paying more than twice as much for the gasoline than you were under Clinton. We have had a housing boom, so construction materials would be higher, etc. So I would want to know how much "alightly higher" is verus the costs it would take to actually keep up with the problems there (if I were devising a budget.) But then I am neither the President nor Congress.

    And don't get me wrong, when I say it is the Bush administration, I also lay responsibility for a lot of things on the Republican controlled Congress, who are mostly yes men. There are exceptions, such as Lincoln Chafee, sometimes McCain, Olympia Snowe, etc, but a lot of them up there just rubber stamp whatever Bush wants, and if the budget changes, it's just to shift some extra pork back home.

    But getting back to what we were talking about. If I were making these comparisons of these two leaders, I would also want to know if what Clinton spent on the project is what he was being told was needed at that time versus what Bush was being told was needed relative to what he spent. Because the problem has clearly been deteriorating over time. It's like health issues. In the early stages, it's gonna cost X. In the middle stages, it's going to cost Y, and in the really negalected stages, you are going to have disaster.

    Perhaps Clinton should have solved the problem, although it seemed to me that Clinton's economic strategy was more like people who play the stock market. In other words, he followed the economic cycles and took care of problems more when he had a surplus and then set things aside on the downwards side.

    But to be frank, I think Bush's economic strategy was get lots of oil cheap by stealing it because our economy is run on oil. It just didn't seem to occur to him that some people might not want us stealing oil (and not just the people we would be stealing it from.) Anyway, I am getting off on a tangent, so I will leave it there. Actually, I think he did know some people would be opposed to stealing the oil, but he assumed Karl Rove could spin his way out of anything

     

  • At 2:29 AM, Blogger Samwick said…

    Thanks, Sheryl and Mindwyrm, for these links. I don't think it's possible at this point to have too much information, it's all relevant. And I apologize for not being around this week, things have been hectic here. My plan is to start posting and responding by Monday

    DJ: "How many people need to die for better PR?"

    This is a question that's relevant in a lot of ways. So far about 25,000 civilians are dead in Iraq (more, I'm sure) thanks to Bush's idiotic Misssion Accomplished mentality. The war itself made no sense, but his belief that everything was over and the consequent lack of planning has been an enormous disaster for the people there.

     

  • At 2:48 PM, Blogger Sheryl said…

    That's why I have a hard time separating these issues. Iraqii civilians have just been "collateral damage" in our "war on terror." Now it's likely that American civilians are.

    And we haven't even begun to discuss how Bush's environmental policies of ignoring Kyoto has affected global warming and contributed to the intensity of things like hurricanes. Balking at science is just not the way to run a country.

    Maybe from now on we are supposed to pray our way out natural disasters like this, but frankly I would rather trust the scientists and clean up our environment.

     

  • At 12:42 PM, Blogger Mindwyrm said…

    Sheryl, global warming had nothing to do with the hurricanes increasing. Check out NOAA's data on hurricane cycles and their intensities. Back in the 50's and 60's they had a quite a few more of the higher intensity level hurricanes.

    Secondly, global warming science is bad science at this point. Check this out for an example of why some people see global warming as politically motivated as opposed to scientifically. Here's another one. it's pretty old but when you've got a sizeable number of the world's scientific community with major issues with what's supposed to be a scientific theory, I think you have to take a step back and look at the theory again.

    As for the funding for the projects, to me the primary question is not how much the federal government earmarked for LA because it was obviously more than any other state in the union. The question is really how the locals spent those funds and it's painfully obvious that they chose poorly. I have never liked the idea of the federal government funding what are local projects. I live in tornado alley. Should it be the feds jobs to build tornado shelters for the citizens here? No, it's a local consideration and should be handled at the local level.

    Everyone in NO has known for decades that the levees were sinking and how essential they were to the survival of the city. Instead of looking at what they can do as a community to protect themselves they expect a handout from the state or federal level to ensure the city is protected. For NO the levees were an absolute necessity. That should have made them a priority to the citizens of NO. Maybe it's just my point of view but if I have to pony up extra money in the way of sales or property tax to protect myself, my family, and my home I have no problem with that. NO didn't approach it that way though. It was supposed to be paid for by the feds or the state or basically anyone but them.

    Do I sympathize with the people who have just lost nearly everything they own and are likely to be dependent on the kindness of strangers for a while? Yes. Do I think that the community as a whole should have done more to take care of themselves ahead of time? Yes. Does that mean I won't donate my money and my time to do what I can to help? Of course not, but I do think that the harping on the Fed's funding of the levee's is the political incarnation of misdirection.

     

  • At 4:13 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Sheryl-
    Regarding your statement: "My mom was telling me about some major flood they had in the area back in 1926 that also wiped out a lot of poor people. It didn't affect New Orleans at all though because New Orleans was not below sea level at that time, so you have to be careful about comparing expenditures if you go too far back in time. "

    I agree that you do have to be careful about what you are talking about from history (expendatures or otherwise). NO has been below sea level since pre-colonial days and the first levies were built by some of the first settlers. The land has continuously dropped since then due to a myriad of geological functions (check out the USGS if you don't believe me). So, why the flood you mentioned didn't cause as much damage doesn't have anything to do with the ground level and everything to do with what was living/built there at the time vs what's there now.

    That being said... it has been known for CENTURIES that NO is subject to catastropic flooding since it was first settled. In every preceeding flood and hurricaine the people who lived there had no choice but to rely on themselves and their neighbors to survive and rebuild. It's completely absurd to think that one administration, on congress/senate or even one mayor/govenor could have forced wide-scale changes.

    If you want that much 'forward thinking', start lobbying your Senators and Representatives to force-evacuate Miami now. It's going to be hit by a cat5 sometime in the future. Hell, you believe in the whole global warming spin... all costal cities should therefore be evacuated... including NYC, DC, Seattle, LA, SanFransisco... And don't even get me started on SanAndreas...

    Now that I've brought the obsurdities to light, you'll say that I'm letting everyone off the hook... You'd be wrong. I blame all the officials for all the reasons that the pundits and bloggers have already hashed thousands of times. But I also blame the folks who lived there (both who evacuated and who didn't). They knew that where they lived was in a serious danger zone and did nothing about it. How many had flood insurance? How many lobbied their state representatives to upgrade the levies? How many participated in evacuation drills? How many has disaster kits stocked months before hurricane season? Not enough....99% would not have been enough...

    Now you think I'm cold-hearted, to blame the victims...You would be wrong again... I've given time, money and personal energy to help those who have been affected. But I still hold them accountable for their previous choices and hope they'll make better ones in the future. I hope each of us who have been impacted by this tragedy from afar take the time to look at our own lives, and homes and start asking... How safe am I? What can I do, now, to make sure I don't need the State or the Feds to come save me? What types of things in my neighborhood can only be fixed by the State or Federal gov? What can I do to ensure that my representatives are doing all they can to update their response procedures?

    By taking personal responsiblity for where you live NOW, that's how you prevent tragedy.

     

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