Sixty Minutes Has Found the Mayor
The little snippet at the beginning sounds like he’s in rare form. And CBS has a reputation for fair and balanced reporting to protect, as we all know…
UPDATE: I will now confess to being a lousy correspondant. I couldn’t watch more than the first 5 minutes of it. Turned my stomach. If there is any point-counterpoint at all, I won’t be the one to bring it to you. I have failed miserably.
No living soul has yet to ask this guy, to his face and on camera, “what did you, YOU the Mayor, do to prepare your city and it’s people?”
UPDATE: The Guard is hitting back, even though the article talks about them ‘playing cards’ as Rome burns. Or drowns. They’re tired of being beat up by the Mayor and the City. And, I dare say, the national press.
The National Guard commander, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, said the reservist force was slow to move troops into New Orleans because it did not anticipate the collapse of the city’s police force…
The National Guard commander said the city police force was left with only a third of its pre-storm strength.
“The real issue, particularly in New Orleans, is that no one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans,” Blum told reporters in Washington.
“Once that assessment was made … then the requirement became obvious,” he said. “And that’s when we started flowing military police into the theatre.”…
…Blum said that since Thursday some 7,000 National Guard and military police had moved into the city. President George W. Bush on Saturday ordered an additional 7,000 active duty and reserve ground troops.
Blum said any suggestion that the National Guard had not performed well or was late was a “low blow”.
The initial priority of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard forces was disaster relief, not law enforcement, because they expected the police to handle that, he said.
Humanity...or the Lack Thereof | Mr. Bingley | 
September 4, 2005 9:08 pm
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I watched the whole thing THS and understand why you would turn it off. I’m not sure I want to post the things I’m thinking right now. I need to think about it.
I’ve said it before, Dave. You’re a stronger man than I am, Gunga Din. I also guess this means I didn’t miss any pt/cntr-pt, huh?
I’ve been wondering where he vanished off to
No counterpoint. Just a failure to address Nagin’s jaw-dropping assertion that the feds should have ignored the law and blasted on in to join his cluster-F. I just spent two hours writing a post out but I’m so angry, and uh, my buddy Jim Beam stopped by, I think I’ll wait until tomorrow. You didn’t miss anything worthwhile when you turned it off.
Jim seemed to have missed me on his way down the street. Wish he’d stopped…
(Excellent rant, by the way.)
LTG Blum is exactly right. The Guard does not have a law enforcement mission. That is a civil authority task, not military. The collapse of the NO police force was pretty much the grounds for declaring martial law (or is it “state of emergency” in Louisiana?), because civil authority pretty much ceased to exist. That was unexpected, making the actual Guard response pretty close to being a miracle.