Liberal Talk Radio

Here:

Josh Marshall has a full rundown on the various implications of this NY Times article, which seems to indicate that while hurricane victims were dying on national television, the Justice Department was debating the fine points of posse commitatus and worrying about whether it would look good to take command from a female governor. This is the same justice department that has declared torture to be legal and asserted a previously unheard of doctrine that the president has unlimited powers during wartime.

Perhaps Bush should have declared war on Mexico, then nobody would have been confused about whether the president of the United States could legally respond when the Governor of Louisiana said she needed all the help she could get.

All snark aside, he makes a good point. Many people (including myself), have posed the rhetorical question: “What if Katrina had been a terrorist attack?” The implication of this is, of course, that the Katrina response “proves” that we’re unprepared for such an attack. However, I think that we can reasonably argue that, had a plane flown into New Orleans, or some other unnatural disaster had occurred, all the right bells would have gone off in D.C., no one would have bothered to worry about usurping jurisdiction, and the response would have been swift and sure.

I guess what I mean to say is that, unfortunately, people (even great leaders) can be extremely narrow-minded and literal — unimaginative, almost — with these sorts of things. For example, I’m reading Plan of Attack right now, and what’s most striking is how the war planners, from Bush on down, are so focused on whether Saddam would repeat the things that he did in Gulf War I: would he attack Israel? Would he set the oil wells on fire? Such literalist, traditionalist thinking hampered the entire project.

Something similar happened with Hurricane Katrina. Our leaders were myopic. It’s clear that when the Department of Homeland Security took up this formal position:

In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort.

they meant it, at least on paper. But when the moment hit, they hadn’t internalized it in their gut. Maybe, in the end, it means you can’t fix it with paper. Maybe it has to be hindsight. Maybe everything terrible has to happen once, and all we can expect from our leaderes is to prevent it from happening twice.

Or maybe we just need an intelligent human being in charge of FEMA. I honestly don’t know.