Monday, September 05, 2005

What about the school buses?

You might think that an insightful critique of disaster management would encompass a knowledge of logistics, meteorology, socioeconomics and other difficult subjects. According to the wingnutosphere, you would be wrong. Based on nothing more than an AP photo,



various denizens of the pajama brigade have come to the conclusion that the only thing that went wrong with Hurricane Katrina was the failure to deploy school buses.


JunkyardBlog
I take no pleasure in counting up buses, Googling seating capacities and tallying up the number of lives that might have been saved. But when the blame game started, Mayor Nagin and Terry Ebbert made it necessary to do so.


Same guy, guesting for Malkin:

And they fact of their unuse demonstrates a deeper pathology at work in New Orleans government: The entire thing was rotted from the inside out. New Orleans' government was a disaster waiting to happen.


Captains Quarters:
So the failure to order the buses out of their yards wasn't some failure of imagination on the part of Nagin and New Orleans. It isn't a case of the city not understanding the scale of what a Cat-4 storm could do to the city. According to New Orleans' own emergency plan, those buses should have rolled at least as soon as the mandatory evacuation order was given on Saturday, if not when the voluntary evac order came earlier. The city's OEP failed to carry out this crucial part of the emergency-response plan, which is why so many of the poor, infirm, and just plain stubborn citizens got stranded when the levees broke.


Free Republic:
The order should have been placed BEFORE the storm hit, when President Bush gave the evac orders. But I guess we shouldn't expect much from DUmocrats who run the state.


It's a perfect republican meme; it takes the blame off Bush and puts it on a local Democratic official, and it reduces complex issues to something really short and sweet, perfect for interjecting into watercooler conversations and comment threads on liberal blogs.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh. I thought you were going to offer up a useful rebuttal.

And then I remembered that isn't any Eschatonian's strong suit.

The Kenosha Kid said...

If you want a useful rebuttal, look here.

Anonymous said...

Why is a rebuttal useful for a non-starter of an argument, Putzhole?

Remember that Furious George Federalised the effort days BEFORE Katrina hit by declaring Louisiana a Federal Disaster Area. Needless to say once the project is Federalised, you can't unFederalise it despite the efforts of the mindless drones of the wingnut brigade.

If Furious George and the rest of the Busheviks and the 101st Fightin' Keyboardists aren't up for handling disaster relief, which time has shown they aren't, Dear Leader should have kept his fuckin' mouth closed and resigned the job en masse to people who could do it, like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro to name two, who despite other reservations are more effective leaders than Putzhole's lyin' photo op King.

oldwhitelady said...

Those buses may not be usable, after this. There's water, everywhere, in them, with silt and dirt, sand, etc.

Brady Westwater said...

The buses are only the start of Ray Nagin's sins. See my Sunday night post on how the media has covered up his lies - and why people have died because of that.

Anonymous said...

It's a perfect republican meme

and the perfect democrat response is, yes, both nagin and bush deserve to lose their jobs for this. they failed. they cannot be trusted any longer.