There are a lot of things that the Administration did wrong with respect to Katrina, but even the Administration, and certainly this thread, deserve accuracy.
Your comments about Condi Rice were made first on 9/1, long after the levees broke. New Orleans, was not "flooding," as you rhetorically but inaccurately suggest, but flooded.
As Secretary of State, Rice had absolutely no responsibility for these kinds of incidents. In terms of actual responsibility for a governmental activity, the lowly Postmaster General probably had more at stake than the Secretary of State.
Has it occurred to you that a partisan press would hound Rice's every step, reporting every second of her normal routine, and blasting her if she was not constantly pulling out her hair over Katrina? But in point of fact, what could she contribute from her position as the head of the department that deals primarily with foreign affairs? If some urgent foreign problem arose while she was dealing with Katrina, and she failed to deal with it, or didn't attend to it within a nanosecond of it happening, the press and you too, I fear, would have hounded her for abandoning her desk. To suggest, then, that she "evaded" responsibility, is inaccurate.
Condi was simply not a good politician. She should have worn black, attended a few prayer services, made a few sympathetic pronouncements, etc., but in the big scheme of things her actual responsibility and her ability to affect an outcome was next to zero. To get incensed about her activities as a private citizen, however, is a bit much. I'm sure thousands of folks bought shoes and attended conventions during Katrina.
And, no, there has not been "zero" progress, as you state. You are simply 100% wrong about that. The pace could be picked up, and a lot more could and should have been achieved by now, but there are lots of things that are working. To say "zero" has happened is simply inaccurate.
The problem is that once people adopt a mindset based on emotions, and Katrina certainly caused a lot of folks to do precisely that, any attempt to look at the issues objectively goes out of the window. |
