--- Gilbert Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Victor, > I could not read the attachment that may have > attached to your posting. > > However if you will bear with me, I would like to > respond to what the headline of your post suggest. > Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster exacerbated > by human miscalculations. > > It realy does not matter what others think of > Americans. It matters what we Americans think of > ourselves and what we do about it. > Mario responds: > You have made excellent points, Gilbert, and the response after the initial chaos has been typical of America and Americans. The political response from the rest of the world has also been typical, from some, immediate offers of assistance, from others, gloating over what they see as another opportunity to attack the US and President Bush. > As you must have seen in the world media, as well as the left-wing media in the US, many are using the response as a political weapon against President Bush, by deliberately pretending this is a top-down dictatorship, without any knowledge or understanding of the federal system of government, and who exactly was responsible, by law, at every level. > For example, only Fox News has reported that it took TWO personal phone calls from the President to Governor Blanco before she reluctantly agreed to declare the state of emergency on the Sunday before Katrina struck. How many people know that the President cannot, by law, intervene in a state short of an act of insurrection by the local Governor? > I saw the head of the American Red Cross say in an interview that they, as well as FEMA and the Salvation Army, were prevented from going to the Superdome and the Convention Center the day after the levees broke, by State of Louisiana authorities. Why? Because they wanted to discourage people from staying at these places. In the meantime, the Mayor was yelling his head off for help, after he had forgotten his own "mandatory" evacuation order for the 25% of people who did not evacuate Nawlins, and hundreds of school and city buses, that could have been used, sat idle. > The race baiters got into the act because many of the victims in Nawlins were black. The fact is that with a 70% black population and 75% pre-hurricane evacuation rate, many more blacks had evacuated than those who stayed, for various reasons, which covered the spectrum from apathy to outright carelessness to illness age and disability. This last group were the real victims of the failures of leadership. > How many people know from only seeing what happened in downtown Nawlins on their TV screens that there was a 50 mile by 1/2 mile swath of total destruction along the MS coast and part of the AL coast, with little loss of life because most of the people had evacuated, and almost all the property owners there were white? > How many Americans, forget the ignorant Europeans, know that there is an Orleans Levee Board whose sole responsibility was the safety of the levees that have protected Nawlins for over 300 years. Filled with political hacks appointed by the Mayor and Governor, this Board had the power to raise funds through tax exempt bonds to upgrade the levees. Instead they had invested in casinos and commercial development projects. > Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (LA) has been one of the most strident national politicians trying to blame the President. She needs to be careful. Unless one is familiar with LA politics, one would not know from her comments that she and her family have dominated Nawlins politics for decades like the Kennedys have in MA. Her father used to Mayor for years, her brother is the Lt. Governor right now. Yet she has not introduced a single bill in congress to address the problems of the levees in her state, and neither has her family taken a leadership role in this brewing issue of the inadequate levees in the state itself. > Not many people know that President Bush was asked by the Governor of MS, Haley Barbour, NOT to come down to the disaster area until AFTER the emergency search and rescue operations had been substantially accomplished, because he and his entourage would just divert attention from saving lives. > But you are absolutely right. The only good that ever comes out of a screw-up is that it should never be repeated again. Let us hope the political opportunists will be suppressed by cooler heads and Nawlins will rise again, safer and more charismatic than before.