We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Washington, Madison, Jefferson sweated it out in Philadelphia at Wigstock to put together the constitution for several reasons. One was to form a more perfect Union, because the confederacy wasn’t working out so well. The other reasons for the constitution were the BASIC purposes of government: a system of justice, law and order, secure liberty, and to defend the citizens.
Government’s most basic job is to protect its citizens. I’m not talking welfare or education. I’m talking protection. If government can’t do that, then it’s time to close up shop in DC and move to Montana with a shotgun.
Yes, government failed last week. And failed bigtime.
To say that government can never protect its citizens and to shift blame to poorly prepared citizens is ludicrous. I think that 9/11 was an excellent example of when government works properly during times of disaster.
In the coming months, I would like to see more comparing and contrasting of the two situations. I think that one key different (there are others) was that in NY, there was a mayor on the ball with an excellent team. Pataki followed Rudy’s lead, instead of wilting like Blanco. The NY Senators did their job milking the federal government for money, instead of patting them on the back. They NY Senators got the help from DC, so that Rudy didn’t have waste time screaming help into the TV camera like the New Orleans mayor. Every layer of our federal government did its job.
Government must defend and protect the public not only against looters, but against natural disasters and foreign terrorists. It has to be the first order of business to see what went wrong and rectify things. Has FEMA been devastated by Congressional pork and insufficient oversight? How do you manage disasters in a federal system of government? Who should do what? What do you do when a major player has a nervous breakdown in the midst of all this? These questions need answers.
If all this self-examination produces no results, if you are quite certain that the government is unable to improve its ability to protect its citizens, then I will take that one way ticket to Montana and a shotgun, please.
Apt. 11d 
But can they both be compared to fairly? 9/11 didn’t see NY geting decimated tot he level that New Orleans did. Conversly, how long have people said that New Orleans would be in complete ruin if a big one hit? We also weren’t fighting a multi front war at the time and had plenty of troops and people willing to help out. September 11th wasn;t on Labor day weekend either.
LikeLike
You must have been busy with that paper to have kept quiet about NO this long! I started to compare the two (here in the NY area I think we feel it more personally) but those on the outside of both cities I don’t think get the immediate impact. What’s different is that NO is a natural disaster, not an attack, and they had warning and still failed miserably. Even those that worked hard and tried their best will be held up for inspection and found wanting. I think the key will be can we find it in our hearts and wallets to prepare for all emergencies? When you tell people to get off the ship, you give them a life boat. You don’t just say jump, you tell them how high.
You invest money in things that may never be needed. You have mobile homes ready to be set up for housing. You have communications methods that actually work.
We have food and water in our basement set aside for hurricanes, and each year we replace it with fresh stuff and use up the old stuff (even canned stuff goes bad)and we include cat food in the hurricane box. To prepare for a natural disaster the country has to value the job that these people do, even if they’re never needed. Wouldn’t that be nice.
I hope that good can come out of this disaster.
LikeLike
We’ll never know what Rudy would have done in New Orleans, but I suspect it would not have been a whole lot better than what happened. Awful as it was, the 9/11 attacks were far more contained than Katrina. Most of NYC was untouched. Rudy was not sitting in a hotel without power and water trying to respond. Moreover, had New York been under nine feet of water, I think that he would have been far more hapless.
Moreover, the current disaster unfolded over time. The storm passed and it looked like New Orleans was spared. “Dodged a bullet” was the Monday morning newspaper story. It wasn’t until Monday that the real flood started, and Tuesday that it was apparent how terrible the mess. I think that hindsight has people now thinking that on Sunday that was all apparent. When planes run into a building, the situation is clearer from the start.
I’m all for analyzing the current disaster and comparing the response to other, more effective respones. But I think that major earthquakes are a much better comparison.
LikeLike
The issue of being at war is neither here nor there. We did not get those military resources we did have available into place fast enough. First, it is clear that the National Guard simply cannot muster fast enough for these shocking sort of events. Whenever we have had hurricanes in NC (even in the pre-Iraq war, pre-Bush era) it has taken a few days to get the guard fully online. Bush has shock troops (on call emergency units of the 82nd Airborne, Marine Corps Expeditionary Units, elements of 75th Ranger Regiment, a wide array of Special Forces assets) that can be there very quickly (we’re talking hours) and with decisive firepower to restore order. However, it is not straightforward to do this: Bush must invoke the Insurrection Act, essentially vacating another called Posse Comitatus. Although I feel he made the wrong call by not doing this, I don’t think that this should be part some bill of particulars against him. The precedents all weigh against such “federalization” of law enforcement (ie using federal troops to enforce law). And this is a good thing. (Note to those who are so quick to throw these restrictions out in the wake of Katrina: learn a little Roman Republican history. Become familiar with names like Lucius Cornelius Sulla or Gaius Julius Caesar before recommending we do anything that makes it easier and less politically painful to inject federal troops into civilian life: it took a long time for the absence of such prohibitions to pave the way for the fall of the Roman Republic, but eventually it did play out that way and when it comes to things like civilian mastery of the military, I think the long view is the correct one.)
Even if those troops had been sent in, there is still not much they could do to affect rescue until a large helicopter fleet was on the scene. (Helicopters require a vast logistical base to support their operations, even in the short run, and the evidence seems to suggest that that base was rushed to the scene with all possible speed and that at each moment the number of helicopters operating in NOLA was essentially the max that that base could support given the buildup to that point.) No, those troops can only stop the rioting, and that will involve killing people. The truth is that another, different ugly scene would have occurred had the Rangers or Marines or someone like that been sent into the convention center or Superdome. And then there would be a lot of posts in the blogosphere about Bush’s heavy handed response.
By the way, there is a middle path between the extremes here: people should neither fully rely on there government for instantaneous protection in all circumstances (a logistically impossible proposition) nor should they absolve the government of all responsibility for failing to provide protection. I live in North Carolina, in a place where hurricanes and the resulting disruptions are a possibility, and I do own a shotgun. But I also expect the government to relieve me of the burden of having to keep it loaded in the wake of a disaster with all possible speed (given the circumstances). By that standard the federal and state governments earn neither an A or an F in this circumstance. Mistakes were made. The feds, NO and the state of Louisiana made serious mistakes in the evacuation phase (why, for example, were buses that could have evacuated many not mustered by Nagin or Blanco as it became apparent that it might be necessary to do so? Should Bush have federalized at that point?? Once we failed to get those people out we dug a logistical hole that was going to be very hard to get out of even under an ideal post-storm response by Bush and Blanco) and the disaster relief phase (Blanco failed to properly exercise her authority, either in terms of mustering the resources of unaffected parishes toward relief or calling up the guard quickly, etc.; Bush failed to do face the music, regardless of political cost, and federalize the situation when it was becoming clear that Blanco was out of her depth). But at the same time, in the end the disaster is not comparable to 9/11: 9/11 was a punch in NYC’s face, but was not the knock-out blow Katrina was. I suspect that as with many situations where there are very strong reactions, history’s assessment will settle on this more mixed view of the thing.
LikeLike