"I take responsibility"

[Minionman]

"talk is cheap" is not a valid complaint by it self. But essentially it is the entire basis for your post.
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Yes it is. Granted, the only way to tell how cheap it is is to see what happens in the future. What "taking responsibility" is all about is trying ot keep people happy. The hurricane has already done its damage, but people are supposed to stay happier because someone "takes responsibility". Considering the difference between some people looking for jobs, dead people in all the effected areas, missing people, etc, and some words which may or may not be backed up, I think there is something ot complain about.

[Minionman]

*attempts to drag thread away from troll*

In other news, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has officially "taken responsibility" herself.
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Same thing applies there is to the national government.

[TaMeOlta]

"The true measure of a general does not lie in victory . It lies in defeat . To continue to lead after the worst has happened is hard , but if they do not lead from there who will ? "

-- a little bit para-phrased ;)

[kandrathe]

*attempts to drag thread away from troll*

In other news, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has officially "taken responsibility" herself.
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I wonder how many politicians will now scrammble to claim responsibility. While I don't agree entirely with the following article, I think it is a tempered and well crafted discussion. At least a better source for discussion than that paragon of jounalism, the NY Daily News. I think it frames well the points in which we all feel moral outrage.

Katrina: Responsibility, Theirs and Ours

Who is responsible for the Katrina disaster? Who is responsible for the slow response to provide relief to the victims? Beyond the Federal and Local governments response, which we have touched on, at the outer boundries it is everyone who has contributed green house gases which have helped to raise ocean levels and temperature which make any catastophe more severe. We citizens in the US, and those in Louisiana are responsible for allowing such poverty to exists in New Orleans. In another thread we have discussed the Local and Federal governments lack of will to fund the building of hydrolic protection systems for New Orleans.

[Walkiry]

At least a better source for discussion than that paragon of jounalism, the NY Daily News.
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You're still chirping about that? Hit Google news and compare the reports from just about any journalism center, and you'll see they pretty much say the same thing. For once, Bush was actually clear, and the only one having problems with the report seems to be you.

[kandrathe]

I don't get it - where's the spine?  It's a meaningless, empty statement, with nothing behind it (aka it has no spine).  Occhi has already said as much higher up in the thread.
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With regards to President Bush and Katrina, I think you are wrong. I see him involved now directly leading the relief effort after his appointed deputy had failed and resigned. I will be watching for his plan in his speech tonight in New orleans.

The spineless approach is to deflect blame until it either evaporates or sticks to someone else. I'm thinking of recent government investigations where the accused either obfuscated and evaded, or ignored the issue until it evaporated from public consciousness. In rare cases, like James Traficant, the perpetrator is convicted and jailed. But in most cases, like Hillary Clinton, they walk away mostly untainted.

[kandrathe]

You're still chirping about that? Hit Google news and compare the reports from just about any journalism center, and you'll see they pretty much say the same thing. For once, Bush was actually clear, and the only one having problems with the report seems to be you.
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Yes, I have problems with the NY Daily News as an objective journalistic source.

I hit your link, and lo and behold link.

Here's another one you might want to add to your bookmarks Pravda.

Are you going to continue today to call me more names?

[Ashock]

Here's another one you might want to add to your bookmarks  Pravda.

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Excellent source of reliable information. "Pravda" does mean "truth", so they must be reliable.



-A

[Occhidiangela]

It is a very valid complaint. Talk is cheap, because a person who is given power is supposed to act on his words. Bush supposedly vowed to improve the disaster response after September 11th, 2001. Here we are, 2005; a hurricane later and it's not like we are in much better shape than we were. I think it's about time we see what this mythical "responsibility" thing is, not just hear Bushy boy mechanically move his mouth. The basis for my post is that must act according to their position, not just talk.

How soon we all forget.

1. Mechanically moving the mouth is what all politicians do. Ever hear of a man named Al Gore? He mechanically moved his mouth per his advisors and lost an election. He then wrote his own stuff, and was himself, in his concession speech. Lo and behold, we got a glimpse of a man, maybe even a leader. Were he not so willing to do what his "handlers' and other "advisors" advised him to do and say, were he not so enamored of his entitlement (as a child of privilege) to rule (and had the chads not hung and all that other crap) he might have made a decent president. We'll never know.

2. Last year, 4 hurricanes, one of which was a real sonofabitch, hit Florida. (George, soaks Fla Panhandle.) Friends of mine in Pensacola lost their house, and everything in it.

Did you hear all of the moaning and whining then? All this rending of garments. All this gnashing of teeth? No. Why? FEMA and the state and local agencies did well enough, and I will suggest that the reason they did not do "well enough" in New Orleans was that it was

A Compound Disaster.

The entire levee/flooding issue in New Orleans, per my opener in the other thread, has been a threat for apparently decades. And it has been wished away, hoped away, cronied away, ignored away, etcetera, for decades. Now the ostriches are crying because someone, Katrina, gave it to them up the arse. Katrina is unreachable, as a force of nature, so they look for and presume Human agency for an act of Nature. What crap.

Some of the culpable want the blame finger pointing anywhere but at them.

Moral Cowards.

I saw Mayor Nagin once again on CNN last night, almost twitching, as he described the stink and utter ruin of his fair city. (Despise him or not, that's gotta hurt, down deep, for your city to get creamed like that. The feeling of helplessness has to hurt Hizzoner . . .)

Walk, you are on solid ground if you remain focused on "is this all empty talk?" Your attempt to assert a profound neglect of disaster prep at the Federal level since 9-11 is

PURE BS!

New Orleans is a "one of" in that it is/was a compound natural disaster.

As to improved Federal action, as a single data point: I have been hearing public service announcements every freaking day for 4 years about "being prepped for emergencies" sponsored by federal awareness programs. Even though I live in a hurricane zone, I never heard federal level stuff like that before 9-11. State and local, yep, not federal.

Don't mix your tea with dog piss, it won't taste good.

Occhi

[Walkiry]

Excellent source of reliable information. "Pravda" does mean "truth", so they must be reliable.
-A
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Sounds almost as good as "newsbusters." I wonder if they wear a patch on their arms and use an old firefighters building as their Headquarters.

By the way, what's the point of that link anyway? I quote:

"Following President Bush's Tuesday news conference in which he took responsibility for federal mistakes following the Hurricane Katrina disaster, some news organizations left out the word federal in their reportage, creating the possible impression that Bush had shouldered blame for state and local failures."

The link I posted did not omit the word "federal", I quoted as much up there.

So what's the whole point? Or did kandrathe just gloss over the title and expects everyone to fall for it?

EDIT: Silly tags...

[Walkiry]

Walk, you are on solid ground if you remain focused on "is this all empty talk?"  Your attempt to assert a profound neglect of disaster prep at the Federal level since 9-11 is

PURE BS!
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Thanks, Occhi. I'm probably letting this get to me far too much. (Belive it or not, despite all this talk about bush, it's Kofi who really gets under my skin).

Talking more focused, I remember *someone* (can't quite put the finger on who) who said that comparing the response of NY during September 11th and the NO one during Katrina wasn't quite the same, since NY had, at the time, a "small army" of firefighters and policemen trained and used to respond to crisis situations. Could it be that in the other hurricanes in Florida the local response was good enough to cover for the FEMA? In NO the local response was almost wiped out.

[Occhidiangela]

Sounds almost as good as "newsbusters."
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Walk, I just realized you may have been asking the wrong question in your sub title.

"I take resonsibility"

"Well, CAN you, really?"

Here's another peep through a different piece of the prism.

How can GWB assume well over a decade of responsibility for a consistent policy of "hope we don't get hit!"

Absent my slap about empty words, such posturing demonstrates at least one of the following

Arrogance
Pretentiousness
Misunderstanding of the terms used.
Meglomania
Presumption that the People are complete idiots

(given our collective track record on the maroons we keep electing to public office, there may be something to that . . .)

The Pres' PR team come off, yet again, as fools and incompetents

Who briefs the man?

Who prepares him?

WTF are they thinking?

Occhi

[Walkiry]

Walk, I just realized you may have been asking the wrong question in your sub title.

"I take resonsibility"

"Well, CAN you, really?"
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That's probably close to what Ashock said before, that the feds didn't actually have any responsibility to take, and the failure was somewhere else.

If he can't, well, he shouldn't.

We could hope he could instead point out why he can't, but if he does that, then the whole budget cuts for the levees will come out. Even if the bigger cuts, or the biggest problems, didn't happen under his watch (I'm not exactly sure of the finer details of the US budget in the last decade or two).

It could, perhaps, kickstart an actual long-term solution, but it'd be at the cost of political seppuku.

So instead we graze over it and hope we get good pictures with some reconstruction workers in the near future.

And ask the engineers to fix that levee with some duct tape while at it.

[kandrathe]

So what's the whole point? Or did kandrathe just gloss over the title and expects everyone to fall for it?

EDIT: Silly tags...
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I characterized your rant as a distortion based on a less than credible source. Don't pick nits over which points of accuracy and credibility their story had. You offered a link and said "They all say basically the same thing..." and I clicked on it. The very top link was where the Associated Press was correcting themselves in that they had err'd in reporting the very story we are discussing. That was my frickin point.

Here is the news conference video from CSPAN which I watched. link -- the question was asked at 20min 35 seconds into the news conference. His answer was more extensive and cohesive in its presentations than the snippets, with crass and colored commentary in the NY Daily News article. That was my point.

Now STFU and get off my fricking back!

[Walkiry]

Don't pick nits over which points of accuracy and credibility their story had.  You offered a link and said "They all say basically the same thing..."

My exact words were "just about any," not "all." Did you keep clicking? I didn't think so either. Did you check how many didn't miss the "federal" part in their report, or how many issued a correction?

His answer was more extensive and cohesive in its presentations than the snippets, with crass and colored commentary in the NY Daily News article.  That was my point.

From Whitehouse.gov

Q Mr. President, given what happened with Katrina, shouldn't Americans be concerned if their government isn't prepared to respond to another disaster or even a terrorist attack?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong. I want to know how to better cooperate with state and local government, to be able to answer that very question that you asked: Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm. And that's a very important question. And it's in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on and -- so that we can better respond.

One thing for certain; having been down there three times and have seen how hard people are working, I'm not going to defend the process going in, but I am going to defend the people who are on the front line of saving lives. Those Coast Guard kids pulling people out of the -- out of the floods are -- did heroic work. The first responders on the ground, whether they be state folks or local folks, did everything they could. There's a lot of people that are -- have done a lot of hard work to save lives.

And so I want to know what went right and what went wrong to address those. But I also want people in America to understand how hard people are working to save lives down there in not only New Orleans, but surrounding parishes and along the Gulf Coast.

"Crass" comments or not, like it or not, the report about Bush's "responsibility" is quite accurate.

Now STFU and get off my fricking back!
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Ooooh, does that mean I can call you names now Mr. Pot?

[kandrathe]

Ooooh, does that mean I can call you names now Mr. Pot?
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This is pointless. Let it go. I will. And, I did not disparage you. Go away.

[Walkiry]

This is pointless.  Let it go.  I will.

Not before making a snark remark, it seems. And the funniest thing is...

  And, I did not disparage you.  Go away.
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Do you actually know what STFU means in internet lingo? You think that's a "nice" way of telling someone to stop talking? *Snicker*

The fact that you're telling me to get off your back makes it even better.

[kandrathe]

Do you actually know what STFU means in internet lingo?
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Yes. My little raving chiahuhua.

[Walkiry]

Yes.  My little raving chiahuhua.
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Ha! Is that all you've got?



That's right, I cut off my own hand. What do you say to that, huh? HUH? You think your little dog can compete? Pah!

[kandrathe]

Ha! Is that all you've got?



That's right, I cut off my own hand. What do you say to that, huh? HUH? You think your little dog can compete? Pah!
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Oh, yeah! My dog eats your hand!