It wasn't so much the brief duration of President Obama's trip to New Orleans that riled the Katrina-smarties -- the folks who've spent the past several years obsessing, healthily, about the destruction of an American city. It was that, when he spoke there, he got his facts wrong. And he got his facts wrong to such an extent that he convinced folks like Harry Shearer that Obama has no idea what really happened during Katrina.
How could this possibly be? Everyone knows that happened during
Hurricane Katrina. It hit New Orleans, causing massive flooding, and
the government's anemic response compounded the disaster.
Shearer quotes Obama:
"Katrina may have swept through this city, but it did not destroy this community, and that is because of you, the people of New Orleans. It has now been just over 4 years since that terrible storm struck your shores. And the days after it did, this nation and all the world were witness to the fact that the damage from Katrina was not caused just by a disaster of nature but also by a breakdown of government. That the government wasn't adequately prepared and we didn't adequately respond.
Eh, not really. Katrina didn't sweep through Orleans Parish. It hit Mississippi with the east side
of its eye, with its most devastating force. It wasn't really a
disaster of nature -- the city's levees were supposed to be able to
contain the effects of a direct category two hit, where Katrina's force
as it passed near New Orleans didn't exceed that limit. Katrina was, at
its core, a failure of the Core. The Army Corps of Engineers, who built those levees and certified them as safe. "Hitting"
New Orleans v. hitting Mississippi isn't a distinction without a
difference. The truth seems to be that the hurricane devastated the
region -- and the levees breached prematurely. The response was slow and inadequate, but the response was secondary, at least for New Orleans.
Writes Shearer:
"The government wasn't adequately prepared and we didn't adequately respond" echoes Obama's campaign rhetoric about the aftermath of the disaster; his other remarks display a glaring, and for such an intellectually voracious and insightful man, quite possibly knowing ignorance of how we got here.
Typically, having mis- or non-diagnosed the problem, he came with no solution, no pledge (aside from the vaporous "build stronger" without reference to build what, how, by whom) to take the steps only the federal government, under strong leadership from a committed chief executive, can take to prevent the disaster from recurring.
This is like asking you how did you get syphilis? Er, I just got it..now I want to get rid of it. People can be so freaking insatiable...I read somewhere that out of like 100 or so things held up by state,local, and the feds the Obama admin has cleared about 75% or so...Even Jindal and some of Bush appointees offered the admin praise..and because it didn't technically destroy or the majority of the destruction was in Mississippi and not New Orleans people are bitchin..please tell Harry Shearer, Morning Starbucks, Eugene Robinson, and all the other whiners to get a life..because...this is why no one bothers doing anything..because people would rather complain about what you aren't doing
tstar3:
Are you one of those obamabots that are enlisted to scour the internet and defend (more like shut down) all criticism, no matter how fact-based and fairly levied? Better run back to the White House liaison for better facts.
You are the one who needs to get a life. Obama and his Chicago thug cronies are having a harder and harder time pretending to get things done when in fact it's a matter of kids driving the parent's car- there's no adult in the White House and the reliance on pretty speeches (ever notice how the "cadence" changes based on audience- ugh) and teleprompters is getting old fast. And before you label me a "rascist" (the last refuge of liberals who have run out of arguments and can't win on the facts)- I am a minority professional woman who happens not to have drunk the koolaid, and not so consumed by hate and arrogance that I can't see the catastrophic impact of this administration's socialist fingerprints on future generations. New Orleans: more pretty speeches, teleprompters, campaigning, and pandering. But people aren't that stupid and are beginning to notice that Emperor Obama isn't wearing any clothes. And btw, how's that HOPE and CHANGE workin' out for ya?
I'm not sure what you mean by socialist. The tax rate was a lot higher under Republican President Eisenhower than anything Obama is proposing. And if you're concerned about unbalanced budgets, that ball started rolling down the hill during the Bush years.
I think it would help if you could articulate what it is you expect Obama should have done by now, and hasn't, and what you think is a reasonable time frame within which those deeds should be (or should have been)accomplished.
I'm not against criticism of Obama per se, however, so much of the criticism we hear is vague and general, and uses buzz words, like "socialistic." These vague generalities are exactly what critics blame Obama for using in his speeches! Let's have some specificity--please.
It was higher under Eisenhower, because no one paid it. Tax loopholes, right, left, and center.
> And btw, how's that HOPE and CHANGE workin' out for ya?
Gotta say, pretty good. :)
Um tstar3 did you read the article?
Let me break it down for you.
It's "coastal restoration."
If we don't get coastal restoration, then all the
other money that's been spent on recovery is wasted.
New Orleans has seagulls flying in the French Quarter.
Do you uh get it? The ocean is a lot closer to New Orleans
than it used to be.
We lose a football field of soil every 38 minutes.
Obama doesn't get it either so you are in good company.
Glitt...The seagulls have been flying in the French Quarter since I first visited there in the 80's. If you want to complain, don't forget to include President Bush...he's the one that didn't do anything. President Obama has gotten more done in 8 months than George Bush did in 8 years. If he didn't spend aenough time it's because the man has a million fires to put out left by the former administration.
The suburbs of Chicago have seagulls flying around so Im not so sure why that is a relevant indicator of anything.
I couldn't agree more with tstar3.
Frankly, Obama's message is far more useful and uplifting than Shearer's.
Saying Katrina wiped out New Orleans is like saying traffic wiped out the Minneapolis bridge.
Both revealed structural flaws. Both exposed blatant civil engineering mistakes.
Read more: http://levees.org/#ixzz0UE8mLGQ7
As usual, lots of Talk. Very little knowledge of the reality of what happened,the actual events, or the true facts. Obama, like carter, talks alot about everything, and does almost nothing about anything. Its all just another campaign stop for him. You can not lead simply by being cool, and apologetic. His other major 'strategy' of blaming bush, isn't working either. Take charge, field a few ideas of your own, and stand behind them.
His biggest single thought is to ask Nancy what to do. Sadly that's how deep he goes. He's a sound bite man. Nothing more.
I just love watching the other side struggle to find an anti-Obama narrative. How 'bout just focusing on trying to articulate a comprehensive alternative?
Hey, wasn't Harry Shearer the one who characterized New Orleans as "the Sodom and Gommorah on the Mississip'" during an episode of The Simpsons back in the 90's?
You know, the episode in which Marge gets a role in the musical version of "A Streetcar Named Desire," and the aforementioned phrase was part of the lyrics to one of the songs: "New Orleans. . .land of drunkards thieves and whores/New Orleans. . .tacky overpriced souvenir stores/If you want to go to hell you've gotta take that trip/ to the Sodom and Gommorah etc.
Anyway. . .my husband and I lived in New Orleans for 10 years, and our assessment is that there is no fix for that city. The coastline is eroding, and will continue to do so much faster than government can do anything about it, even if government was intensely committed to doing so right now. Any remediation would take too much time--the time to have started was years ago.
New Orleans is a city below sea level which will soon be a few miles from the gulf; this could happen within the next 25 years some are saying. Once the ice caps and the Greenland glaciers melt, sea level will rise very quickly. Meanwhile, category 4 and 5 storms are becoming more frequent. Let's be honest: it's not going to be safe to live or invest there, period. No politician wants to come out and say that, but it's the truth.
I loved New Orleans, but the party's over. I'm sort of tired of celebrities making it their cause celebre. It would be weird for Obama to waste a lot of energy over it, because it's a lost cause.
Let me tell you all what the city did with the federal taxpayer money. It is tearing up the beautiful, old steel banded curbs on St. Charles Ave., our premier street, and replacing them. There is nothing wrong with the old curbs- they were so expensive to construct, 60 years ago, that they cannot be replaced with the same type. The streets in New Orleans are so bad right now, that you could literally kill yourself, riding a motorcycle, or moped, on one of the uncountable number of giant potholes, and the city is tearing up perfectly good infrastructure- a fat contract for someone special , no doubt. St. Charles itself, has been in very poor condition since long before Katrina. Given that it is the most prominent, 200 year old oak tree, and mansion lined street in the city, one could see its decay as a bad omen for the city. The repairs being effected on St. Charles are piecemeal, with whimsical rectangular, and square shapes being cut out with a saw, and then replaced with an irregular blacktop surface. This work just started, two months ago, almost five years after the storm. When I asked a local politician, a couple of years ago, why the federal money wasn't being spent, he says "It's like this: the longer you hold the money, the more difficult it is to keep track of it. It just kind of seeps out. If we were to spend that money, in say, 6 months, it would be extremely easy to track where any missing money went, and that's why the federal money hasn't been spent yet."
DUDE! Rewriting history? First, and most obvious error: The walls that failed in New Orleans did NOT fail due to the Army Corps of Engineers. Both places where the wall failed, the city's water and sewer department had REMOVED THE PANELS in years past, to install pipes and valves. The VERY SAME PANELS were replaced in the VERY SAME DISTURBED SOIL! The initial storm surge still did not breach the wall - instead, after many hours of increased pressure, that water percolated through the disturbed soil beneath those wall panels. Responsibility for the failed surge wall rests on the city of New Orleans, NOT the Corps of Engineers. Second, that same Corps of Engineers had been pushing for YEARS to upgrade all the flood protections in New Orleans. They were repeatedly beaten back, and prevented from performing any new work, or even replacement work, by such organizations as the Sierra Club. Fishermen thought that the fishing would suffer if the environment were disturbed. Whether that be true, or not, the environmentalists blocked every effort to upgrade the flood control system, simply because they thought fishing was more important than safety.
I have never read any of Marc Ambinder's work before - I can only hope that he understands the facts, and reports them correctly as a matter of routine. In this case, at last, Mr. Ambinder is grossly misinformed.
Obama has never got it. The news media doesn't get it. But eventually they will. Too much outrage over wall street bonuses while seniors scramble for $250 crumbs. We needed change. We got the changeling.
http://elect-sarahpalin.com
Ugh, "If you want to complain, don't forget to include President Bush...he's the one that didn't do anything." Yeah, because THREE DAYS NOTICE was "Not doing anything",apparently. Not even the best president can save morons from themselves. That being said, Obama like any politician said anything to get elected and now he will spend the rest of his term doing his best to not do anything he said he would. Each election all of the sheep buy into all this crap these politicians spout and then are somehow surprised when the promises all turn out to be lies. Also to the Sarah Palin commenter, we don't need someone who can't even protect her own Yahoo Mail account anywhere near the White House.
He's gotta save something for his re-election speeches. If he, like, ,gets it all done too early, what's there to promise?
Why not just go to Politifact.com. They have what Obama has completed so far in New Orleans.
We'll make it easy.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/subjects/katrina/
I think Obama should just dedicate the next year of his presidency to looking for that magic wand to fix everything all at once.
You know, a Palin presidency wouldn't be that bad... she'd probably spend more of it on vacation than Bush 2 did, hunting moose and whatnot, and she'd quit halfway through and give the job to Michelle Bachman, who would free conservatives from Barack Obama's forced labor camps and replace them with liberal pundits.
.....OOOOHHHHH let's pick some more pepper out of fly poop.....pathetic
Mr. Ambinder asserts via turn of phrase "Katrina was, at its core, a failure of the Core." And asserts culpability rests with the Army Corps of Engineers (one guesses he could not bring himself to use "Corps" in the first part). While there is no doubt no shortage of blame to go around, to call the Corps the core of the failure is too facile. I will assert instead that the core of the failure lies at the core of man himself and his belief that nature can be indefinitely subdued. Hubris is at the core of what happened in New Orleans, hubris exposed by wind and wave and water. Levies which should never have been built, houses which never should have huddled behind them, built through the decades on watches of leaders who pandered rather than lead and citizens who willingly followed. All of whom believed that Mother Nature could forever be held at bay by the puny works of man. Hubris.
The way to save New Orleans from the next Cat 5 is to relocate it to Kansas. Ok, maybe too far, Arkansas.
Umm... What? I know I'm a few days late to this, but am I the only one perplexed by the fact that Ambinder wrote a blog post criticizing the President for making a whole bunch of factual errors in New Orleans on Katrina that is riddled with errors. Seriously, I had to read this thing 3 times to understand what the hell Marc was talking about. I don't know if it is a function of him trying to summarize another blog post, but this was a great big mess.