Another Warning Ignored

So, according to documents released yesterday by Senate investigators, the White House received advance warning of the devastation in store for New Orleans as Katrina approached. A Homeland Security Department report predicted that the city faced massive flooding and the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of residents. The government could've made preliminary arrangements to respond to the impending tragedy, could've put resources into place to move at the first available opportunity. Could've but didn't. Instead, they thought it was better to wait and see what would happen and then claim ignorance--"How were we supposed to know that the levees would break?" We now know the answer to that question is, "By listening to the experts who told you all about it."

This is oddly reminiscent of the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Like that instance, the hurricane warning wasn't enough to get Bush to cut short his vacation in Crawford to attend to the easily foreseen crisis. It was only the destruction of an American city we were talking about. It's not like anybody's life support was going to be withdrawn or anything.

It's getting to the point where we can no longer ignore the fact that either the Bushies don't have any idea of what they're doing or they just don't care. Enter Harold Meyerson in this morning's Washington Post. In "Bush the Incompetent," he makes an argument for the first point.

Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it's hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things -- particularly when most of them were the president's own initiatives.

The entire op-ed is worth your time. Go read.