Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I think that's referring to these two paragraphs from the WaPo article you posted earlier:
- Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
Stop and think about this for just a second. The conservatives here -- well, Penske mostly -- are busy blaming state officials for not doing their job. Now we're supposed to believe that their failure was in not turning over the whole operation to the federal government? Um, right. And the federal screw-ups were pretty clear before the episode described above.
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The nagin transcript was from yesterday, but it adds some color to the dynamics described in the WaPo article, though it is unclear when each of these talks took place. Sounded to me as though the face-to-face happened after the events in the waPo article, but perhaps not.
I think you mentioned how you do not live in Polarized World and so it's possible there were screwups all around. I agree. But I'd say that putting aside lack of preparedness beforehand (perhaps Nagin's area), it was and is reasonable to expect the governor of the state to do
something other than cry and punt. ATthe very least she should have made sure that her people worked with and for the feds or whoever could come in and do the job her folks could not. It wasn't the time to be afraid of decisions or to be worried about appearances. And what was she doing going on tv complaining about not getting help if she wasn't able to accept it?
