Karl Rove and the Politicization of Disaster Response and Reocvery: Delivering Talking Points While the Canadians Rescue Louisianans
How to Polish this One?
Today I received another comment about the school-buses that were left to flood, that could have been used to evacuate people from New Orleans during Katrina. I was reminded of the years of corruption in New Orleans and Louisiana under Democratic leadership.
It was a talking points attack on New Orleans. It was an attack by numbers, taken directly from the talking points that were immediately orchestrated by Karl Rove, even as people drowned in their attics in New Orleans. I’ve just read the most appalling account of the rapid politicization of the disaster response in How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned.
I could feel it. We were all working together in a relatively small building. We were in close proximity. But I could see where Rove was going. Blame Blanco. Blame the levee board. Blame the corruption in New Orleans. ‘The reason the city is going underwater is because the city is corrupt,’ Rove was saying. ‘But don’t blame the Republicans or George W. Bush or David Vitter. We are the white guys in shining armor, and we are going to come in and save the city from years of corruption.’ That was their story and they sold it very well.
The response to the flood was the responsibility of the federal government. Local agencies are not equipped to respond to disasters of this scale, which is why we maintain agencies like FEMA. The response was appallingly slow. As documented in Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, Homeland Security comically muddled around attempting to establish their own lines communication, ignoring State of Louisiana officials, in some sort of parody of the hyper-secretive government agency making a Spy vs. Spy charade out of natural disaster response and flood rescue.
To give you an example of the absence of federal response to the disaster, the first trained rescue squad to reach St. Bernard Parish was the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Team of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (2,852 miles and they brought their own boats.)
It’s frightening to live in a nation under the control of a GOP that has become positively Soviet in their desire to create a single-party rule. With this new accounting of the politicization of the disaster response, one cannot ignore the potential of a politicization of the disaster recovery. Does the glacial pace of the recovery indicate a continued desire to shrink the footprint of this Southern Democratic enclave?
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So insulting… where do you start?