I don't believe any government at any level should be responsible for evacuating those that are not sick or orphans. This is an antiquated notion, like personal responsibility. But Nagin apparently does believe governments should perform this service, which makes his actions uniquely appalling.
I'm not a fan of George W. Bush, but I think Bush-haters are irrational and hate him for all the wrong reasons. There are plenty of intelligent, sensible reasons for hating him and it's just foolish to ignore them.
FEMA sucks in a big big way, but the effects of FEMA's suckage could have been dramatically mitigated had any effort whatsoever been made.
I harbor no illusions that the city of New Orleans would have remained unscathed no matter how perfect the leadership.
After seeing the fruits of Ray Nagin's "leadership" the voters of New Orleans have spoken. What they said is they want more of the same. Let's recap some of Nagin's notable accomplishments:
-Deliberately placing people in harm's way in the Superdome- Even in a city below sea level in the path of a Category 5 hurricane, you're going to have people who won't or can't evacuate. Fine. But the people in the Superdome left their homes to go to the Superdome, so it's safe to say those who took shelter there would have left the city had transportation been offered to them. And there were undoubtedly those who didn't go to the Superdome but would have left the city had transportation been offered to them. Faced with the choice between going to the Superdome or hunkering down at home a few miles from the Superdome, choosing to stay home is hardly unreasonable. Not only did Ray Nagin's carefully thought-out hurricane plan fail to offer the evacuation option to the city's poor, he also failed to realize that the people he invited to the Superdome might like to have some food and water. Then, not only did he make no effort to arrange for this food/water to be at the Superdome, he didn't even bother to tell the governor to withdraw her orders to stop food trucks that came on their own, from both FEMA and the Red Cross.
-Screaming like a jackass- Nagin responded to his own failure to use the many, many buses available to him as mayor of New Orleans BEFORE the hurricane to get people out (of a city that anyone remotely interested in New Orleans and its levees KNEW would flood if hit by a hurricane such as the one N.O. was directly in the path of) by shrieking that "I need 500 buses man" as if someone else could possibly be more responsible than he. Further, even if it wasn't within his ability to get those buses pre-hurricane, he could have at least asked for help before the hurricane. He did not do this. When urged by George Bush to evacuate N.O., he said something along the lines of "I be the mayor of New Orleans, so mind your own business." Apparently N.O. voters did not see the photos of the hundreds of flooded buses. They couldn't possibly have bought his crap about bus drivers not being available. Bus drivers were found after the hurricane that went into a lawless disaster-stricken toilet of a city, so finding some before wouldn't have been impossible. It just wasn't attempted.
-Stole hurricane planning money- What else could have happened to it? New Orleans had a budget for such planning, which was undoubtedly excessive, considering the city wasn't any safer 20 years ago than it was on August 29, so there should have already been plans in place. Yet there is no evidence of any planning, unless you consider the trapping of people inside an ill-equipped sports arena to be a well thought-out plan. Even if you don't fault him for stealing the money, for, after all, theft is a proud tradition in the Crescent City, should he not be faulted for not also stealing a hurricane evacuation plan from another city? Galveston seems to have had a good one for the better part of a century now. Would a little copying and pasting and changing "Texas" to "Louisiana" have killed the guy?
Not only did this guy not help, he actually HARMED the city. This is obvious to anyone who watched. FEMA harmed the city, you say? No, New Orleans received the same crappy FEMA response that, say, Hancock County, Mississippi (which actually took the brunt of the storm) did. But, as evidenced by the total mayhem in New Orleans as compared to the civilized actions of the residents and leaders of the other areas (most of which took a far worse beating) affected by Katrina, FEMA wasn't the problem.
But the people have spoken. They prefer a man with blood on his hands.
