Buck? What Buck?

Two generations ago, one man was forced to make vital decisions greater than any person in his position had ever faced. He decided that the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan, and he decided that the U.S. would lead a coalition of armed forces to defend South Korea against an attack from its neighbor. He decided the latter as part of a drive to assert the power of The United Nations.

Harry Truman made those decisions and stood by them. Every day, those two decisions are dissected in a hundred coffee shops, a thousand college classrooms and in numberless bars. Boldly, on President Truman’s desk, a small plaque proclaimed, “The Buck Stops Here.” Every day he is damned to Hell and praised to high Heaven for those choices.

Today, newspapers all over the world are reporting on the great lengths that the White House of George W. Bush is going to churn out disinformation describing how the failure of government to respond to the calamity that faces us in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is the primary responsibility of the three states and the many local governments most impacted by Hurricane Katrina and not that of the federal government. How low can we go? Pretty damned far down I’d say. “Can you hear me down there?”

Why do we have a federal emergency management function? To me it’s simple; in the first instance to bolster the state and local response to crises that are too large for them to effectively manage without additional resources from outside and in the second to stand in when a calamity completely overwhelms the states and local entities.

Katrina was known to be a dangerous storm many days before it struck the Gulf Coast; it killed eleven people in Florida. It was known to be developing into a killer storm several days before it struck. That it would strike the Gulf Coast at about its point of attack was clear. The states and local governments warned their citizens to evacuate. (We know now that evacuation of New Orleans was a physical impossibility.)

The states (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) and the localities most impacted mobilized and threw all of their resources into the breach – minus those National Guard troops and equipment in Iraq. The federal government was monitoring and preparing during this phase of the situation.

The storm struck. The rest is history. The states and locals were overwhelmed. The federal response was late and insufficient.

The states and locals are saying they were completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the storm. It is self evident that they are correct in this assessment.

The White House is moving Heaven and Earth to shift blame from George W. Bush to the States and locals.

Buck? What Buck?

Blog on!

Wild Bill