Not to mention a large percentage of the Louisiana National Guard being deployed in Iraq, especially the combat brigades that would be the front line at the levees. And not to mention their equipment including command and communication equipment, all-terrain vehicles, etc.

I don’t live in Louisiana. The large scale federal response failure is the same that would be replayed where I live though. And is the same incompetence I pay for with my taxes.

I tried to think of a way to play devil’s advocate with this, but… Damn. There’s just no defending it. I got nothin’.

I agree, and I was not trying to imply that. However, I do honestly believe that, under a President Gore, the federal response would not have taken 5 days or mismanaged the whole thing so badly. FEMA trailers would not have sat in upstate LA for months, I highly doubt they would have been toxic, and I highly doubt that warehouses full of supplies would have sat unused for 3 years.

Again, not trying to step on a hornet’s nest or anything, just speculating what America would be like if we hadn’t all fell into this long national nightmare.

I’m not sure how even the most loyal Bush supporters can argue against the fact of the renaissance of cronyism under his administration. This led to major legislative action in the late nineteenth century after the presidency of Ulysses Grant (whose chief talents seemed to be drinking and hanging out with rich people) and I suspect it will again sometime soon.

In other words, I think you’re probably right; at least that amount of blame is appropriate.

The federalism argument with regard to Katrina could make some sense. The National Response Plan, according to the Wikipedia article, in fact delineates the responders in ascending order from local to federal authorities. This is not to say that the President/FEMA own no blame, but that to place it all at their feet is an oversimplification. It seems possible that Katrina simply overloaded the bureaucratic apparatus designed for disaster response.

Keep in mind that this is written from a position of only casual acquaintance with the event. If anyone has any information contrary to that (leaving aside shrill partisan hackery), I’d much appreciate it. As a liberal my ‘blame Bush’ nerve is as sensitive as anybody’s, though I’d prefer to make sure it’s appropriate first.

So, Farris, are you saying that KBR is the only company that can sell our troops $8 Cokes in the middle of the fucking desert?

Under Bush there are lots more $billions in no-bid contracts coupled with a lack of oversight and accounting. As a matter of fact, government employees holding up payments waiting for proof of service, receipts and overrun explanations have been removed from their posts under Bush.

You apparently don’t understand the Attorney scandal or are deliberately ignorant of it as you demonstrate.

Let’s see, $8 million to the INC vs. lying to the American public followed by a fouled up invasion….

Har de har har, it is to laff.

Yes, really. Saddam would have been easily contained. And Osama bin Missin would have been found by now.

In case you didn’t get the memo.

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

Did you not get the memo?

“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

The majority of the attorneys under the Clinton administration were REPLACED you idiot, expected when a new administration comes in — as done in 1993 and the Bush administration did in 2001. The Clinton administration never fired federal prosecutors as pure political retribution.

Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff Kyle Sampson admits that the Clinton administration never purged its U.S. attorneys in the middle of their terms, explicitly stating, “In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision.”

_ Haliburton was getting no-bid Contracts in the 1990’s too due to the fact they’re basically the only company that provides the services it does. If you don’t like it, you’re more than welcome to start up your own firm. More power to you, sir!

- No Attorney firing scandal? Really?!?

- No Conflation of the threat posed by Saddam? Really?!?

-No ‘black sites’: Why are you so racist?

He concedes that Clinton beefed up domestic anti-terror efforts and then points at a series of attacks that happened outside the country.

By his standards, Bush’s administration has been a dismal failure because of repeated attacks including 9-11, repeated shelling of the US green zone in Iraq, various attacks in Afghanistan, consular bombings around the world etc.

The Bush doctrine following 9-11 can be summed up as using the spectre of 9-11 to advance Bush’s political agendas. Iraq, elections, appointments, domestic spying, weakening the constitution…

-Major polluters wouldn’t have a free ride
-9/11 may have happened anyway, but action would have been taken and Gore would not have stayed in that classroom for an extra 20 minutes.
-No Homeland Security agency, but a beefed up FEMA
-Katrina response would have been WAAAY better and faster. New Orleans would have been cleaned up by now.
-No invasion of the wrong country
-No conflation of the threat posed by Saddam
-No Haliburton, KBR or Bechtel no-bid contracts in perpetuity.
-No Blackwater
-No Abu Ghariab scandal
-No ‘black sites’
-No torture
-No wiretaps on US citizens
-No Valerie Plame scandal
-No US attorney firing scandal

…on and on and on.

Any questions? No? OK, then.

From my german point of view Obama should win, I believe with McCain the US-German relationship would cool down even further.

We may want to go back to Eisenhower, for approving the coup against Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (whom my former roommate informed me is still one of the most popular figures in Iran, although the government is uncomfortable about acknowledging him because of the secular views he held). Perhaps also the CIA and the Mossad, both of whom taught SAVAK agents how to ‘interrogate’ Iranian students critical of the Shah, and were regularly present for those interrogations.

Carter, certainly, for many reasons. Brzezinski has admitted that the administration TRIED to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan covertly, to ‘give them their Vietnam.’ Whether or not that was the decisive factor in starting the war is probably impossible to know without access to the Kremlin’s archives, but that’s still pretty ugly in my book.

The Bush doctrine is to eradicate it and cut it off BEFORE it happens.

I think this is also the Putin doctrine in Chechnya. I wonder how many Muslims we have to kill before they’ll start to like us.

Bush Sr. does have some responsibility, as do Reagan and Carter. NONE of them realized the threat for what is was until after the fact, and because they collectively kicked the can down the road instead of tackling the problem head on, we got the result we did. Now that we know the seriousness of the threat, however, the question is what do we do about it.

The Bush doctrine is to eradicate it and cut it off BEFORE it happens. The Clinton/Kerry/Obama doctrine is to arrest everyone involved after the attack, hopefully after the debris stops smoking. In November, we’ll see which approach Americans prefer.

Credit where credit’s due. Under Clinton’s watch, the Millenium attack got stopped. He also, perhaps inadvertantly, semi-invented the terror alert system. Good for him. It just goes to show you that stopping one attack (Millenium) doesn’t exactly make up for all the times you miss (the first WTC, Khobar, Cole, Embassy, …)

It’s still a mystery if Farris’s secret plot to violently murder parody and irony in one fell swoop is still ongoing.