The New York Times, having published the usual nonsense from Dowd, Krugman, Herbert and Rich, finally steps forward with two pieces from which the reader cannot escape concluding that failure to apply the talents of the Corps of Engineers to the levees around New Orleans was in substantial measure the fault of senate Democrats like Mary ("I might have to punch him (Bush) - literally") Landrieu, and that the delay in getting troops to the city was largely due to reluctance on the part of Governor Kathleen Blanco to give up her authority and her confusion over what steps were necessary for the federal government to get troops into the area.
John Tierney writes that:
[S]uppose [Congressional] investigators try to find out why the Army Corps of Engineers didn't protect New Orleans from the flood. Democrats have blamed the Iraq war for diverting money and attention from domestic needs. But that hasn't meant less money for the Corps during the past five years. Overall spending hasn't declined since the Clinton years, and there has been a fairly sharp increase in money for flood-control construction projects in New Orleans.
The problem is that the bulk of the Corps' budget goes for projects far less important than preventing floods in New Orleans. And if the investigators want to find who's responsible, they don't have to leave Capitol Hill.
Most of the Corps's budget consists of what are lovingly known on appropriations committees as earmarks: money allocated specifically for members' pet projects. Many of these projects flunk the Corps's own cost-benefit analysis or haven't been analyzed at all. Many are jobs that Corps officials don't even consider part of their mission, like building sewage plants, purifying drinking water or maintaining lakeside picnic tables.
The Corps is giving grants to improve New York City's drinking water. In Massachusetts, the Corps offers BMX-style bike jumps at a lake near Worcester and runs a theater next to the Cape Cod Canal showing a video of "Canal Critters."
In rural Nevada, an area not known for hurricanes or shipping channels, the Corps has been given $20 million for construction projects. When I asked an official why so much was being spent in Nevada, he said that the money was paying for wastewater treatment and mentioned the name of Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat's leader in the Senate.
"Senator Reid is a great and good man," the Corps official explained, "and he is on our committee."
This week Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat, lambasted Mr. Bush on the Senate floor. "Everybody anticipated the breach of the levees, Mr. President," she said. But she and others from the Louisiana delegation have been shortchanging the levees themselves. As Michael Grunwald reported in The Washington Post, they've diverted large sums to dubious Corps projects aimed at increasing barge traffic, not preventing floods. Ms. Landrieu forced the Corps to redo its calculations when a project to deepen a port flunked its cost-benefit analysis.
As for the responsibility of Democrats at the state and local level for the delay in getting aid to the evacuees in the days after the flood a trio of writers from the Times notes that:
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.
Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area.
Viewpoint offers no criticism of Ms Blanco. She was in a terrible spot and may have thought she had good reasons for her delay. We only wish to point out how despicable it is of the Left which was almost obsessively scathing in its criticism of the administration in the days after the storm to have used this calamity to attack Bush politically. Not interested in waiting for the facts to be brought forward, they were determined to hang him first and have the trial later. He was called a racist, incompetent, oblivious, dangerous - every mean, hurtful adjective that mean, hateful people could put into print and some they could only put on blogs.
Now it turns out, as more sober observers were saying from the beginning, that though there may be lessons to be learned from this disaster on the federal level, the great share of the responsibility for how events unfolded in the immediate aftermath must be borne by the victims themselves, some of whom displayed atrocious behavior and very poor judgment, the administration of New Orleans, and Louisiana state officials, including Senator Mary Landrieu.
We'll be waiting in the days ahead for the apologies to start rolling in to the White House, but we won't be surprised if we have to wait for a very long time. The sorts of people that were so quick to say the contemptible things about another human being that Bush's critics were saying about him, the sorts of people who were so quick to pull the trigger on the shotgun of blame and recrimination, are not the sorts of people who have the class, the character, or the maturity to acknowledge that they were wrong.
