For six months, fingers have remained rigidly extended, moving from target to target, seeking someone — anyone — everyone to blame for the hideous disaster of Katrina. It’s the State, the Federal, the Levee Board, the racists, the dishwashers, the aliens…. Damn it, somebody owns this freaking mess!
Yesterday, the AP released an illuminating video, and it is very clear where the buck stops.
It’s true that the current president didn’t initiate this banquent; the meal went into the oven long ago. In the intervening years, many cooks served in the disastrous Gulf Coast kitchen of eroded coastlines and wetlands, badly designed and poorly maintained levees, and crippling layers of bureaucracy.
“There was this fog of bureaucracy,” Brown said, repeating his call to restore FEMA to independent, Cabinet-level status outside the department. “People either didn’t want to know about it, or didn’t want to deal with it.”
There’s been a great deal of ducking and weaving on the impossibly slow emergency response, and Americans were told that the White House just didn’t realize how serious the situation was – particularly in New Orleans. However, it turns out the president was fully aware of the risks and implications along the Gulf Coast – including the dangers to the levees. Bush flat-out lied to the world:
“Bush declared four days after the storm, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees” that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility – and Bush was worried too.”
It’s said that a leader is only as good as the people who advise him, and at many levels, Polimom sees truth to that.
White House officials said the footage reinforces what they have said to critics: that the president, at his Texas vacation home, was fully engaged from the opening hours of the emergency, while leaving operational decisions to the agencies in charge.
But the ultimate responsibility cannot be delegated. At the end of the day, the hand on the tiller on August 29, 2005 belonged to George W. Bush – and the ship sank.
Polimom says it’s time to stop looking for targets with that finger. Ownership of the fatally flawed federal response lies with the person America elected to lead, and whether he lied or was a gullible fool doesn’t really matter any more, does it?
Regardless of party, ideology or affiliation, neither a fool nor a liar has any business in the White House.
Polimom’s been told that incompetence is not an impeachable offense, but it might be wise to remember some of the lessons from Katrina when we next go searching for a leader.