Bush’s folly

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Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, September 7, 2005

At times like these, many feel an instinctive wish to rise above politics. With bodies still emerging from the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, partisan bickering ought to be the last thing on anybody’s mind. But acknowledging our common humanity shouldn’t blind us to the reality that much of the devastation wrought by the storm is as much a consequence of human folly as nature’s wrath. It does no honor to the dead to pretend otherwise. For more than a generation, pretty much all we’ve heard from Republican (and some Democratic) politicians in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and elsewhere is how the federal government was the source of all domestic ills. Grover Norquist, the Washington political operative widely credited with devising the GOP’s winning strategy, famously stated that he didn’t want to abolish the national government, but shrink it "down to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub."

Although he spared us that unfortunate metaphor, under Norquist’s guidance, the Republican National Committee actually e-mailed party activists on Sept. 1 urging the abolition of the so-called "death tax" preventing America’s multimillionaire inheritors from pocketing every dime of Daddy’s money. Great timing, right?

That was the same day President Bush ended his five-week vacation with a hastily arranged visit to scenes of devastation on the Gulf Coast, during which, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported, rescue helicopters were grounded for hours to protect his safety.

By Monday, Sept. 5, the usual anonymous "senior Bush official" in the White House confided to The Washington Post that the almost unimaginable failures of the Bush administration to act in the wake of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans were actually the fault of local Democrats.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the newspaper reported, had failed to declare a state of emergency empowering the federal government to take over. Newsweek obligingly added that Blanco "seemed uncertain and sluggish, hesitant to declare martial law or a state of emergency, which would have opened the door to more Pentagon help."

In fact, history records that Blanco declared a state of emergency on Friday, Aug. 26, with Hurricane Katrina still two days from landfall, a Category 5 storm with 175 mph winds. (The Post printed a bland retraction.) Indeed, whether or not Bush knew it, his office declared a federal state of emergency on Saturday, Aug. 27.

That morning, the normally dry National Weather Service briefing warned: "MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS... PERHAPS LONGER... ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED... POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS ... WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS."

And still the president played golf and strummed a guitar, the Pentagon did little or nothing and the Federal Emergency Management Agency dithered. In 2004, when less intense hurricanes threatened Florida, a swing state governed by his brother in an election year, the president was Georgie-on-the-spot. FEMA acted so decisively that it’s still under investigation for disbursing more than $30 million of "disaster relief" in Miami/Dade County, 100 miles from the nearest gale force winds—including six claims of "ice and snow damage." On the morning of his first visit to the Gulf Coast, Bush told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that "I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Days later, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, whose previous claim to fame was as chief GOP inquisitor in the Senate’s farcical Whitewater investigation, lamented that the experts neglected to predict the failure of New Orleans’ levees. He called the flooding "breathtaking in its surprise."

In reality, the New Orleans disaster was perhaps the most widely forecast in American history. A FEMA report written before 9/11 said the three likeliest U.S. catastrophes were a terrorist attack in New York, a San Francisco earthquake and a hurricane hitting New Orleans. For years, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other local media have published veritable encyclopedias of expert warnings that a Category 4 or 5 storm would cause a calamity of biblical proportions.

After the 1995 flooding, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control program to bolster levees, but Bush repeatedly slashed funding to the point that construction was halted and a hiring freeze put in place in 2004. Louisiana politicians argued in vain that as the nation’s single most important port, New Orleans’ safety was a national security issue. Instead, the Bush administration allocated $100 million in 2005 to the "Garden of Eden Wetlands" restoration at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Nobody knows if Hurricane Katrina would have breached New Orleans’ levees had experts been heeded and the projects completed. But if there’s a lesson here, it’s this: Facts and ideas do matter. Choosing feckless leaders who advertise their mistrust of government and disdain for science, and who habitually reward loyalty over competence, can have appalling consequences when things go wrong.

Lily Tomlin said it best. "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."