The 8th
Don't believe your eyes and ears
" ... His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home, and every day she called him and said, ‘Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, ‘Yeah, Momma, somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you Friday -- and she drowned Friday night.' " -- The Ledger Independent, Sept. 5, 2005...
... In essence — and this cuts to the heart of the matter — Bush loyalists are asking us not to believe what our eyes have seen.
Said CNN's Aaron Brown: "What planet have these people been living on?"
Terry Moran of ABC apparently agreed. On Tuesday he cited the federal government's "catastrophic failure to respond."
Clarence Page in this newspaper on Wednesday called the government response "sluggish." Homeland Security, he wrote, "flunked its first big test."
Tom Foreman grew up in New Orleans. He knows the Big Easy. On CNN, two days after Katrina hit, he used huge Google map images to show highways open in the western part of the city. He was, he said, "baffled" why supply trucks weren't using those roads.
We learn more each day.
Reported Newsweek: There was "hesitancy, bureaucratic rivalries, failures of leadership from city hall to the White House." And this: "A strange paralysis set in. For days Bush's top advisors argued over legal niceties about who was in charge."
The public response, according to Time, seemed "inept." The news magazine made a telling point. Singer Harry Connick Jr. was able to get to the New Orleans Convention Center and offer help, but not the National Guard."
(Note: The reason the Guard did not make it was because it was not ordered by superiors to do so. The Guard itself, the Army, and the Coast Guard have performed brilliantly. To say that leadership was to blame would be a colossal understatement.)
In Florida, the day Katrina hit, 300 ambulances were lined up and ready to go. Didn't happen. FEMA did not give the go ahead.
In Houston, the same day, tractor-trailers were ready, waiting, and loaded with water. All the drivers needed was the word. It never came.
Finally, it took the president of the United States a full four days before he addressed the nation about the Gulf Coast tragedy.
And it was he — not me, not reporters, not commentators — who said we "came up short," who said the response was "unacceptable."
That, if nothing else, was at least one small step for the truth.
