From CNN:
“My guys are coming back and telling me, ‘Sir, I went into a house, and there are three elderly people in their beds, and they’re gasping, and they’re dying,’ ” Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Jones said.
“And we got calls today, ‘We need you … to go to a place in St. Bernard Parish. It’s a hospice, … and there are 10 dead and there are 10 dying.’ But those people were probably alive yesterday or the day before.”
Though pilots, rescue crew members and maintenance workers are red-eyed and exhausted, they’re refusing to rest, CNN’s Karl Penhaul reported.
Meanwhile, also from CNN, the Secretary of Homeland
Security tries the patently false claim that
no one could have foreseen this:
Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans. (See the video on a local paper’s prophetic warning — 3:30 )
“That ‘perfect storm’ of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight,” Chertoff said.
But, of course, this is patently false:
But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail.
Now, what actually is going on? Who is the current director of FEMA? Well, he’s MIchael Brown, a political appointee whose prior claim to fame was being fired as the director of the Arabian Horse Association. That’s it. Somehow, mishandling a horse owner’s association is qualification, in this administration’s mind, for running the federal office responsible for handling national disasters.
Of course, the administration has had an agenda of dismantling FEMA also, they have repeatedly cut back funding for strengthening the levees around New Orleans, as engineers and the Army Corp of Engineers have requested.
As the first quote above shows, the average joe is doing heroic work, to whatever they can manage, to handle this disaster. The same is true for our servicemen and women in Iraq. Today I spoke to a pilot on leave from Iraq. He had spent several months there, and was trying to brew a few beers, before returning to ferry A10’s to the gulf.
Our soldiers, coast guarders, fireman, policeman, and pretty much every citizen, continue to show what america is truly about, giving more than their best for their fellow americans. They deserve to have leadership, and a government, equally committed to the values we espouse.
Instead, we are stuck with a corrupt, juvenile, and simplistic administration which ignores real warnings for false, and spends vast sums of money and lives on an illegal and unnecessary war, pulling our national guard away from their true duty, and ignoring the requirements of our true national sequrity.
Is President Bush responsible for this natural catastrophe? Of course not. Though I believe if he could, he would somehow misdirect the courses of hurricanes. Fortunately, he does not have that power. He is, however, responsible for the failure of our national guard to respond until five days after a hurricane for which we had two days warning, and for the lack of preparation which might have ameliorated this disaster.
His insane policies have cost not only the lives of close to 1900 american personnel in Iraq, they are also responsible for thousands of lives yet to be counted in New Orleans and throughout the south. The blood of all these people is on his hands, as well as on the hands of all those who voted for him, returning him to office.
