:: Running from the Thought Police ::

:: Thursday, September 01, 2005 ::

The Preznit Wasn't A Boy Scout

If I couldn't have told that from his bio, I know that there's another way to tell. The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared." Four years ago this month, a major terrorist attack occured. I'm sure you remember the date. In the wake of that, the Bush Administration reorganized the government, creating the Department of Homeland Security, to better prevent such attacks and deal with them when they occured. In the wake of the devastation caused in New Orleans and other areas of the South by Hurricane Katrina, one of the observations circulating in the lefty blogosphere, sparked by an email sent into Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, is that the devastation caused by Katrina is that the preparations for a major terrorist incident, such as the detonation of a dirty bomb, are nearly logistically identical to those required to respond to a massive disaster such as this. Sure, we're dealing with toxic industrial chemicals in the environment instead of radioactive dust, but the government's task of feeding, caring for, and evacuating people from the are exactly the same. Seeing as the administration is passing rhetoric ("I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." -Our Lying President, "That's why we have a massive effort underway to continue getting food and water and ice to those who are in need. There are ways for them to get that help." -Scott McClellan as people are dying of starvation, thirst, and sickness outside the convention center in New Orleans) instead of the government's job actually getting people out of there in reasonable health, one really has to wonder what they've been doing the past four years to make our country better prepared to deal with events like this. Not much, apparently.

We had 36 hours warning that New Orleans was going to get screwed. Most terrorists aren't kind enough to give that much of a heads-up. I hope to God that we a)elect a Democratic congress a year from now and b)put a Democrat in the White House in 2008 - I'd much rather hear GOP whining about how the government's evacuation pattern's inefficient than read news reports of people dying while waiting for evacuation busses that, currently, aren't coming.

UPDATE: ILPundit has some pairs of quotes demonstrating this.

:: The Squire 3:36 PM :: email this post :: ::
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