Hurricane Katrina Was Not Bush's Fault....

...but the lack of preparedness and response is.

With all the threads going about the hurricane, I thought I'd at least take this one issue and separate it from the rest.

Now no one is saying that W. somehow magically created a hurricane to devastate a bunch of Negroes in New Orleans. It goes without saying that he did not, so I'm honestly unsure why all of the apologists are actually taking the time to point that out. Sure W. is a fuckup, but he ain't that powerful a fuckup.

But I honestly don't see how people can't see this for what it is. Does your loyalty to a man or idea blind you that much?

Who's the president? Who's the Commander-in-Chief? Whose administration, consisting of the Dep't of Homeland Security and FEMA, dropped the ball?

It's W. And that part is simple.

Do the mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana - who, by the way, should just resign right now; she's a disgrace - share some of the blame? You're damn right they do. But their responsibility pales in comparison to the glaring oversight W. and his people made.

It was W's budget that slashed over 80% of the funding for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requests over the last few years to fix and maintain the levee system around New Orleans. He did so in spite of nearly every climatologists claim that a major storm would wipe out the city - I guess tax cuts were more important. The mayor and even the governor couldn't do anything about this because the USACE budget and control is entirely federal, it lies within the Pentagon and thusly under W's direct control.

Again he didn't cause the hurricane, but was extremely negligent in preparation for one.

It was W that took FEMA from being a Cabinet-level agency and rolled it into the Department of Homeland Security, under the auspice of making it more effective. It was also W who chose the man in charge of FEMA, a man with absolutely ZERO experience in any kind disaster relief - just for your edification, disaster relief was all Clinton's man, James Lee Witt, ever did his entire career.

W's FEMA chief, Michael Brown, former "czar" of the Arabian Horse Association, is so imcompetent that he didn't even know that people were stranded at the Convention Center, despite the continuous media coverage of people stranded at the Convention Center. He also lied on numerous occasions saying that food and supplies were being distributed to the stranded when everyone, including those interviewing him who called him out on that, could see that nothing was happening.

He became what he is because he is one of W's friends. That's negligence on W's part, pure and simple.

It was also W who created the bloated beauracracy known as the Dep't of Homeland Security.

This could have just as easily been a terrorist attack. While no one could've prevented it, one of their major charges is to be ever-prepared to respond to any disaster, supposedly more efficiently than anyone else. They're so fucked that even though they saw this one coming, no one did anything. Sufficient troops and supplies weren't mobilized beforehand and even now, a series of trucks prepositioned for disaster relief, each with $2.2M worth of rescue equipment, go unused. They're so fucked that they withheld certain aspects of assistance because they weren't "formally" requested by local authorities.

It didn't take a rocket surgeon to see that there were no local authorities on the ground to make such "formal" requests. No one at FEMA of DHC thought to make airdrops of supplies. No one at FEMA or DHC followed through on their own promises to airlift the sick from hospitals for days and days. No one at FEMA or DHC followed through on their own promises to try and plug the breaches of the levees. No one at FEMA or DHC followed through with their own mandate to do a damn thing for nearly a full week.

This makes me shudder to think of how our government would respond to a dirty bomb or chemical attack. If it happens, I just hope it isn't windy. That might be the only help we get for a while.

Again, it's not W's fault the hurricane happened, but it was his people that seriously, and negligently, handled this situation. Who else is to blame?

Come on, the man was playing guitar while people were dying. He's so stupid that he couldn't even see the political error in that.

There is a racial aspect to this. I've grown too weary to say much about it though. Anyone who needs to have it pointed out to them that everyone left who could and those would couldn't because they're too damn poor did exactly what they were told in assembling at the Superdome and Convention Center (and yes, I know white people are there, too and that there are white people stuck on the roofs; but who, by the way, told them to do that?)...well, I got nothin' for you. You're just off in your own little world where you should probably stay.

That goes for those of you who want to point out that all the looters are black. Most of the time that statement comes with the caveat that all blacks are looters and gangbangers and should be left to kill each other. It's retarded for anyone to make that connection. Under that logic, because some of you are racists, I must assume that all white people are racists.

But this does beg the question: if white faces were at the Superdome and Convention Center, would they have been there so long with nothing?

I'm not saying W is racist. But he sure didn't give a fuck when they were just poor people. Now they're poor and stranded and no one seemed to care. That's another argument altogether though.

The bottom line is that while W couldn't have prevented this disaster - well, maybe he could've had he listened to those who told him the levees needed work - he hasn't responded in a way befitting the "most powerful country in the world." In that, he is negligent and frankly deserves to be removed from office. I'd be saying the same thing if the president's name was Liberty McLiberal. Some things are just that unforgivable.