Who Could Have Known?
You may remember the incident earlier this year when a small plane flew unexpectedly into DC airspace and our nation's capital responded to a terrorist red alert. I do, although I think it didn't come back into my mind until Frank Rich referred to "…the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives".
Those incidents were in my mind when what should float past but a shadowy echo of the President expressing his surprise at the breach of the levees in New Orleans: "I don't think anyone expected that."
Then I realized that, contrary to the vehement misdirections of the Bush-League apologists about the negligent response of our "leaders" in the aftermath of Katrina that we'd seen it all before in miniature. Think back to those exciting moments when we thought that Washington DC was under attack by terrorists:
- The President was riding his bicycle, oblivious to any threat;
- The Vice President rushed to hide out in a bunker; and
- The evacuation plan for the Capitol was "run for your lives!"
Doesn't it sound eerily familiar? The same presidential lack of awareness, the same leadership vacuum, the same level of "preparedness". Didn't we find ourselves, even then, saying "if this had been an actual emergency…"?
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on Sunday, 18 September 2005 at 16.02
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Good point. Let me add that if Fearless Leader could be bothered to read a newspaper every day, even a right-wing rag like the Wall Street Journal or Washington Times (since he disdains the media generally as too left leaning) he could hardly have missed a crucial bit of intelligence. The fact that those levees were only designed to stand up to a category 3 storm — and might not be able to do even that as they were old and in need of maintenance — was widely being mentioned in the press and on TV around the time Katrina was bearing down on southern Louisiana.