My sister actually called me last night after Bush’s speech to see if I had seen this:
ABC News producers probably didn’t hear what they expected when they sent Dean Reynolds to the Houston Astrodome’s parking lot to get reaction to President Bush’s speech from black evacuees from New Orleans. Instead of denouncing Bush and blaming him for their plight, they praised Bush and blamed local officials. Reynolds asked Connie London: “Did you harbor any anger toward the President because of the slow federal response?” She rejected the premise: “No, none whatsoever, because I feel like our city and our state government should have been there before the federal government was called in.” She pointed out: “They had RTA buses, Greyhound buses, school buses, that was just sitting there going under water when they could have been evacuating people.”
Bush-haters better get in their and re-educate those folks real quick! And how dare Connie London avoid the federal failure and instead point fingers at state and local authorities! Outrageous!
Consider this our flame war thread (we haven’t had one in a while).
(And here is a ABC/WaPo poll of 680 evacuees in .pdf format. Some interesting results.)
DougJ
You convinced me, John. After all, nothing can ever really be as convincing as a single anecdote. And let’s remember that if the local official screwed up, then Bush must be a great leader.
And after last night’s speech, there aren’t any Bush-haters left. He won me over, I’ll tell you that.
Another Jeff
I’ll place the over/under for number of comments at this thread at 200.
Not sure what the over/under is for what number comment it will be when someone claims Rove planted this woman in the crowd (although, this might be one of the few times the tinfoil hat crowd here might have a point, because i don’t even hate Bush like most of the commenters here, and even I don’t see how someone can claim the federal gov’t has no blame whatsoever).
wow, i just knocked down my own strawman!
Prudence Goodwife
ABC was surprised? If they had wanted to interview people who were mad at the president a little pre-interview would have turned up angry people. It was just an incredible coincidence that people with no TV for 2 weeks would so elequently espouse the exact republican talking points that Mr. Rove, and probably Mr. Helperin wanted to hear. And why didn’t he ask questions of any young men?
Tim F
Where would Nagin send the buses?
The self-evacuees found their own shelter, in hotels or motels or friends’ couches or their own cars. One thousand buses full of people who couldn’t afford the bus fare out of town would park…where?
Doctor Gonzo
Can anybody explain to me how all these buses would have done a bit of good if they didn’t have anywhere to go? Put aside for the moment finding people to drive them. Put aside for the moment the fact that when the hurricane came ashore, driving around isn’t a good idea. Just tell me where they would have gone.
If you were stuck in NO, and a bus came up to you and said, “Excuse me sir/ma’am, would you like to get on this bus for evacuation? We don’t know where we are going, we don’t know if there will be food, water, or shelter wherever we end up, but would you like to come anyway?” would you get on that bus?
It just seems to me that all the people screaming “what about the buses!” aren’t thinking about what a disaster it would be to have buses full of people with nowhere to put them.
EZSmirkzz
Well John, I guess American conservatism really is dead if the only talking point about the speech was the reaction to it. You forgot to mention the lady that said she stayed despite the warnings, as well.
What is your take on more Federal authority and martial law to cope with federal incompetence and political patronage? How about apointing Karl Rove to head up reconstruction?
Jim
Though I am a bit surprised at where they laid the blame, I can’t say I am shocked at their support for the speech. Here is my synopsis of the speech:
“Great city .. .(blah, blah, blah)
It will be better than ever .. .(blah, blah, blah)
You’re all going to have jobs .. .(blah, blah, blah)
I’m going to give everyone $5,000 .. .(blah, blah, blah)
I’m going to give some of you free land so you can own your homes .. .(blah, blah, blah)
No more poverty in the gulf coast .. .(blah, blah, blah)
No more racism in the gulf coast .. .(blah, blah, blah)”
(This may be a modern “40 acres and a mule” for some of these folks.)
Goodness, if Clinton gave this speech we would be deriding him as a Marxist.
Prudence Goodwife
Tim F-
Wasn’t the town of Gretna waiting for evacuees with open arms?
The south is filled with towns that can’t wait for hundreds of busloads of poor black people to start pouring in.
Maybe they could have stayed in Wal-Mart parking lots, aren’t they america’s favorite campgrounds?
Geek, Esq.
Well, now that Karl Rove is in charge of who gets aid $$, I’m sure folks will be awfully conciliatory . . .
Seriously, though, Nagin deserves his lumps too. And he’s a Zell Miller Democrat, so my partisan instincts aren’t horribly offended by him getting tagged as well.
Ancient Purple
Oddly, I saw interviews after the speech on CNN and MSNBC with people who were evacuees and they were hardly glowing in their praise for Bush. The general consensus was that his speech was too little, too late and a lot of grandstanding.
gratefulcub
Don’t take the bait. BJ Civility Friday!!!!
Serenity Now, Serenity Now
Stormy70
Texas. The evacuees have televisions set up as well, so it’s not like they are sitting in a media blackout situation. Fact is, they like the treatment they are receiving in Bush’s home state. Don’t underestimate the power of all the kindness being poured out on people, who have never been treated that way before.
Green Merrimack
Thanks for posting this John. I totally agree with you and Ms. London. It is a sad day in our country when our President gets blamed for the incompetence of local and state officials. The moment Hizonor Mayor Naggin decided not to use those buses was the moment any Federal responsibility for the poor disaster response was lifted. If Naggin and Blanco had done their jobs properly there wouldn’t have been a need for a large Federal response to this disaster. To blame the President for assuming Naggin and Blanco are competent is beyond the pale.
I think these people playing the blame President Bush game have been blinded by their hatred for the man. It is not his responsibilty to wet nurse an idiot mayor and a weak governor. Get over your hatred and open your eyes.
Trent
Nagin and the buses, Nagin and the buses.
We’re going to be talking about Nagin and the buses for the rest of the decade.
It was a fuck up but it’s one part of a very large event that Nagin was part of.
Personally, i think Nagin performed the best of everyone. Bush and Chertoff were AWOL and Blanco looks like a train wreck. I’m not saying Nagin was perfect, but he was at least THERE.
So, he didn’t perform as well as Guiliani might have. Having the country’s biggest and most trained police force as well as extensive bureacratic capabilities tends to help one’s performance.
And Bush’s speech sucked on all fronts. Even i’m aghast thinking of spending 200 billion dollars to rebuild the region.
Smelma Fingha
I suspect the timing of Katrina. Also the name Katrina. It sounds intentionally ‘Black‘. Why not just name it Katreesha. It’s all a racist, ‘RACIST‘, plot by the usual suspects (white men). I never realized that Jesse Sharpton was soooooo right.
goonie bird
Squark squark i bet its not what the leftists at ABC expected i hope this gace the liberals at the Awful Broadcasting Company a nasty surprise
slide
John Cole at his disingenuous best:
This is what I mean about John being so totally partisan and a total shill for the adminstration. He submits that the few indiviudals that ABC interviewed didn’t blame bush so all us BUSH HATERS must have it all wrong. Yet, he must have read the ABC Poll of the 690 evacuees that he linked to didn’t he? And what did that poll say?
So which should we have more faith in John, the few individuals ABC decided to interview? or the scientific poll of nearly 700 evacuees?
Davebo
I had to wonder myself if John actually bothered to read the poll results.
Laziness or just plain dishonest?
slide
I vote for the latter.
Postscript on the President’s Speech from Brian Williams’ blog
.
Trent
Yea, getting the power on only for the duration of the PResident’s speech is yet another stupid miscalculation. What are they thinking?
They can’t do anything right.
CadillaqJaq
In the Kingdom of America, circa 2005, our Royalty fucked up and let us down. King George the Second failed…. right. So says the scientific poll taken of nearly 700 evacuees.
slide
Dramatic aren’t we? But, no Caddy no one is saying any such thing so you can put away your straw man. The point of showing the poll results is to refute the nonesense that Cole posted about the post speech interviews of a handful of people.
Boronx
Yea, getting the power on only for the duration of the PResident’s speech is yet another stupid miscalculation.
Heh. Sounds to me like they calculated it perfectly. You think this will get any traction in the current climate of unending apologies for Bush?
Trent
It’ll be similar to the way people view Bush’s speaking abilities. We accept the fact that his administration can’t do anything competently so there’s no outrage.
It’s like that annoying acquaintance that everyone has that gets away with every kind of irresponsibility and inconsideration because s/he is too dumb and/or too cute and/or too friendly to hold it against them. Even though you should.
Tim F
Think about that for a minute. The only place in Texas to park 1,000 buses is the Astrodome. Was the Astrodome ready for 100,000 people on Sunday, August 30? Now ask how many certified bus drivers Nagin could call up to drive at one time.
I’m all for giving people their due. If they genuinely screwed up, hang ’em. But this ‘busgate’ nonsense smells like desperate rightwing shit-slinging. Why didn’t Michael Brown fly in and rescue people with his personal jetpack? That would have been nice but it’s not why we wanted him to resign.
Oh,Boy.Stupidity!
Yeah, that’s because the Taliban and Hussein are still in power and there are no steps towards Democracy in the Middle East and because Hussein is still clandestinely working to develop WMDs and because Al-Qaeda is stronger than ever (except the fact that most of its leaders are dead or captured and the organization has been shattered from within) and the econ really tanked after those tax cuts.
Oh, wait…..
Trent
There were only 250 working school busses that could have made the trip. 25,000 people would be an obscenely generous number. (15,000 is much more realistic.)
The actions or inactions of Nagin do not cancel out the actions or inactions of Bush and his cronies.
Seal Pool
Perhaps Fox news is being broadcast on the Jumbotron.
Tim F
Forgot to comment on this part. Everybody and their retarded sister knows that the best way to gain an informed perspective on the world is through the television screen.
Far North
That’s great, John. Brownie was really doing a heck of a job, after all. FEMA was great.
It’s all about image with the conservative. It’s not that the President did a good job. What’s more important to the conservative is the image that the President did a good job. It’s not about homeland security, it’s about the image of homeland security.
Notice Bush’s watershed mark…..the bullhorn moment in New York. What a phony moment that was. It’s wasn’t about leadership. It was about the image of leadership. Peel back the veneer, like Katrina did, and there’s nothing there.
Katrina exposed the results of Bush leadership. DHS is an incompetent Federal agency and is the splitting image of Bush, a lot of blather but no substance. Homeland Security has a high profile and a wonderful propaganda section, but there’s nothing there. Of course, we see what’s happened in Iraq under Bush’s “leadership”.
So yea, Brownie did a heck of a job. That woman at the Astrodome was proof.
Jeff Maier
I think our criticisms of the President should be directed solely at the multitude of errors in judgment, personnel assignment, wrong-headed prioritization, etc. of the President and his key staff.
I think we should be capable of hammering the deserving in a multitasking sort of way.
W.B. Reeves
Enough about what the Feds did or didn’t do. About what they’re doing now?
Anyone interested in more information can use the following link.
http://www.commongroundrelief.org/
jg
Its a sad time in this country when no matter how badly the president fucks up his base manages to deflect the issue back on someone else, all while taking ‘responsibility’.
Yes, monday, tuesday and wednesday the local and state gov’t’s made many mistakes and could’ve done better. Bush wasn’t doing anything. As much as the locals screwed up you have to consider that the situation was far beyond their control from early on. What the fuck was Bush waiting for? Instructions from Cheney?
caleb
I give props to John.
He knows just what to say to get the flames a jump’n.
:-)
DougJ
READ AND WEEP, LIBRULS: A full 10 PERCENT approves of the job Bush is doing in New Orleans. How do you like them apples, bitches?
Don
Fuckups on days -7 to 0 I will happily toss on the shoulders of the local government, tho I will question why DHS wasn’t keeping an eye on what local governments were mis-spending HS money and unprepared to terrorist attack.
Days 1 to N? I look around me in my neighborhood, 30 miles west of D.C. and I wonder how well we’d fare in the weeks after a terrorist attack with these clowns handling the post-whatever chaos. Because it doesn’t matter what the event is, if there’s a mess and someone needs to come in and spend my money to handle cleanup I’d like to see it done at least competently.
Leaving me to break into a convention center kitchen in order to have drinking water and food is not competent.
And really, so some people ABC interviewed blame X and not Y? Isn’t this the same pool of people we got quotes out of about the leveys being bombed to flood out the poor? Why are the random comments from a small group of people (and yeah, 700 out of a city of 500,000 and a state of 5.5M is TINY) who are both shell-shocked and under-educated interesting or reflective of anything?
The Disenfranchised Voter
That is a damn good question. Still waiting for John’s answer myself…
Frankly, I think people at all levels of the government, federal, state and local are responsible. They all did a really poor job. The thing I take the most issue with is Bush appointing a man with no experience in disaster trainging to head FEMA. Cronynism isn’t an issue I take lightly.
p.lukasiak
the local response before Katrina surely left a great deal to be desired. But the bottom line is that the primary concern of the American people is what will happen AFTER a major disaster (be it natural, or man-made) strikes — and how will the Federal Government deal with it?
The whole point of having an agency like FEMA is that it is supposed to be filled with people who are more than just “familiar with the plans” — it should be full of people who have experience with major disasters, and know that “plans” for disasters are seldom able to deal with all contingencies.
The fact is that Nagin actually carried out the “plan” for New Orleans….(get as many people out of the city as possible before the hurricane, and rely on the state and federal governments to evacuate if the worst happens). Blanco attempted to implement her part in that plan….and found that she had neither the equipment (busses) or the manpower (especially the 3000 Louisiana Nat’l Guard troops that are in Iraq) to fulfill it.
ONLY the Federal Government had the means to deal with the aftermath of Katrina—and it was SOLELY FEMA’s responsibility to co-ordinate the response to Katrina. No about of right-wing trashing of Nagin and Blanco can hide that one simple, incontrovertible, fact.
Don
I have no idea why my above post has the long strikethrough but it wasn’t an effort on my part to try to make some point.
Otto Man
If I ever need a reminder for why I’m a liberal, I think I’ll come here to bask in the glory of deep conservative thoughts like these.
Don
Yeah, it’s kinda like drug use. It’s not that doing it’s so bad, it’s the company you end up keeping along the way that’s the really horrid part.
Jane Finch
And since Connie reflects the views of a certain portion of the blogosphere, she must represent the vast majority of evacuees whose pro-federal government dissent from majority opinion was crushed by the MSM, I suppose.
Give me a break…of course not everyone is going to agree. But if Connie represents a significant portion of public opinion, then why is the White House in such damage control mode?
kl
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Mark
Where do you get the idea that “ABC News producers probably didn’t hear what they expected when they sent Dean Reynolds to the Houston Astrodome’s parking lot to get reaction to President Bush’s speech from black evacuees from New Orleans”? If ABC wanted to find someone who didn’t like Bush or if the network wanted to censor pro-Bush comments, don’t you think it could have done so? Maybe the reporter just asked a fair question and aired the unfiltered answer.
DougJ
That’s a statement, not an anecdote, you moron.
vnjagvet
John:
I see the usual flamers have come out of the woodwork on this one. Congratulations. Keep it up. I love to see the DKOS gang up in arms. Especially over here. Bile matters.
Beej
Believe it or not, there was a time when I thought that one of the chief reasons Democrats had trouble framing a coherent, unified political message was because most liberals, unlike conservatives, tended to be thoughtful, intellectual types who actually made an attempt to see both sides of an issue and thus had some trouble being rigidly doctrinaire. Boy was I wrong! Not just wrong, but mega-wrong! Totally, completely wrong! Out to lunch! Out in left field somewhere! Wacko!
There must, of course, be at least one rational, thinking liberal out there somewhere. Isn’t there? Somewhere? Someone? Anyone?
skip
John Keegan’s FACE OF BATTLE argued that participants in battles (Generals included) usually don’t know what is going on the chaos. SimilarIy, I hardly think the people at the CS or the Dome know who screwed up what.
Indeed, it will be a while before anyone really knows where blame should rest in many cases.
That said, it seems obvious that the best imaginable local and state authorities could never have handled an episode like this without quick and massive federal help–help they didn’t get. Arguing otherwise strains credulity.
Com Con
Yup, you got that right. The bottom line is, no matter how slice it, these people had their ass in a sling until GWB sent in the cavalry. You’re damn right they’re grateful.