[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Obama's Katrina (click to view)
Date: May 5, 2010
Predictably, some partisan wags on the right have declared the recent oil rig explosion off the coast of southeast Louisiana to be "Obama's Katrina." The logic is that if President Bush was accused of bungling the response to the hurricane, then the Obama Administration deserves equal blame for not doing enough either before or after the tragedy to minimize the damage.

Good old Newt Gingrich has posted a list of the Obama government's alleged sins in this regard on his website, though it seems his beef is more with the "federal government" in the abstract than this White House in particular.

In any case, I just wanted to make this stupid joke.

[Pseudonym]

Heh. Racist!

I certainly don't blame either Bush or Obama individually for preparations preceding Katrina or the oil spill. Regulations on drilling would probably fall more under the purview of the federal government than the dikes in Louisiana, but tossing the blame around for preparation in both instances seems unreasonable.

We'll have to wait and see to look at the long term effects of the oil spill. It may seem like Obama took a bit too long to respond there, but we hardly have a good perspective on what has been done behind the scenes for this.

We have a bit better perspective on Katrina. Bush could have moved more quickly, and gotten those in charge underneath him to do so, but most of my ire on government response to the issue is directed at Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco and the powers that were in New Orleans and Louisiana. They certainly dropped the ball both before and after the event.

[BartSimpson]

What???

Don't you know you can't criticize Obama?

[Psudo]

I rather like Newt's site. Simple and classy, with the exception of the spherical tag cloud flash gadget that is apparently there just to look high-tech. I hate that, but it's a pretty minor example.

Didn't Obama concede to off-shore oil drilling a little while ago? Yes we can drill baby drill. That makes this calamity now look like part of policy choice. I imagine he'll withdraw his domestic oil drilling initiative now; I never really believed his heart was in it, anyway.

Geez, Bart, that picture is annoying! I had to add it to my adblocker's black list.

[xerxes]

It's not a fair comparision in the least. Knowledge of the extent of this oil spill was unknowable beforehand, Katrina was seen coming a long ways off. Furthermore, the Katrina tragedy was compunded by the fact that Bush looked like he didn't care which was compunded even more when it became known that the head of FEMA was a know nothing political appointee, who, in turn, made sure that FEMA didn't even know how to do its job.

Hurricanes can be seen coming and braced for, oil spills, not so much.

[Psudo]

xerxes wrote:

the head of FEMA was a know nothing political appointee

By "know nothing", do you mean a nativist, anti-Catholic, and/or an advocate of temperance? That seems... unlikely.

Or did you just mean the FEMA head was ignorant of how to do his job? Because prior to Katrina, he worked in FEMA to help with the post-9/11 recovery and reconstruction, and I haven't heard complaints that he screwed that up. Even if he had no other experience, I'm thinking that's a pretty strong indication that he wasn't ignorant of his job.

He claimed he was made a scapegoat for the slow Federal response to Hurricane Katrina; that doesn't seem all that unreasonable or unlikely to me. He then resigned, claiming it was in order to mitigate the negative press attention and allow FEMA to refocus on recovery and reconstruction efforts. That's selfless and, in it's way, noble to sacrifice one's own job to better enable the institution to operate.

I think your criticisms of him are somewhere between exaggerated and inaccurate, but I'm open to rebuttal.

[2Cdo]

Does anyone not realize that in order for the US Feds to act they must first be ASKED by the State for assisstance! Therefore the real problems lie with the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans in relation to Katrina. But idiots like Kanye West won't say that those two ass clowns hate black people because they were black.

Obama will take some heat for this but not even remotely near the heat that Bush took.

[Marcus_Ozius]

There is a growing sensibility in America that all problems are the responsibility of the federal government. Who could name the governor of Louisiana at the time of Katrina, much less the mayor of New Orleans? Responsibility has to be given to somebody, and it's much easier to pass it to a known figure who is partially responsible than to an unknown figure who is more fully responsible. Although a catastrophe can, at times, catapult somebody into stardom, it's a lot easier to just find somebody very well known who is partially culpable and focus on them. Besides, race is the ultimate trump card in American politics.

[Psudo]

Mayor Ray Nagin. I forget the governor's name, but I knew it back when Katrina was headline news.

Go go gadget Google! Louisiana's governor was Kathleen Blanco.

[Marcus_Ozius]

I don't think that the people who post in this forum are overly representative of the nation as a whole. Within the realm of our experiences we are probably relatively normal (relatively), but most normal people don't frequent discussion boards as informative, respectful, and insightful as this one, if they go to forums to discuss things at all. Also, yes, google gives us access to worlds of information, but at the same time, how often do people care to take the effort? With the options available nowadays the easiest, and most common choices seem to be for people to either cocoon themselves in a world of news media where their views are always given validation (Fox, MSNBC), or choose to be given a general overview lacking in depth or penetration with a bit of skewing (CNN, Networks). There are some people dedicated to truth, who check sources, think, discuss, and are intent to learn and to expand their knowledge, but they are the exceptions, not the rule. By and large, blame travels up to the most powerful unpopular figure. It takes a lot of time to establish a new bad guy, but it's very easy to blame an existing one. If Obama were unpopular, he would be taking more heat for this, but the oil doesn't seem to be sticking to him. For all the unpopularity of some of his policies, he still is seen as a popular person. The notion of Obama is much more popular than the reality of Obama (the opposite of Bush in many regards) and as long as this continues, provided someone else can be blamed (it looks like the democrats are preparing to declare war on BP) Obama will not be. Interestingly enough, Obama really doesn't have any more responsibility for this than he does for anything else that could conceivably go wrong in the country, so it's best that he's not being blamed. It's no more his fault that this happened than it would be if we had another bridge collapse. The reasons why he is not blamed undeservedly, though, are the interesting part.

[Kjorteo]

The people who post in this forum are perhaps overly representative of a group that appears to be perpetually at war with straw racists, in that no one can ever make their point without appending "of course, you can't actually say that because they consider it racist " See also: Marcus_Ozius' last sentence, BartSimpson's post in its entirety.

Psudo wrote:

Mayor Ray Nagin. I forget the governor's name, but I knew it back when Katrina was headline news.

Go go gadget Google! Louisiana's governor was Kathleen Blanco.

And if my quick perusal of Wikipedia... ahem, I mean serious and totally legitimate knowledge of history is any indication, they both indeed took quite a lot of heat for Katrina, enough so that Blanco didn't run for reelection. Nagin was rendered deeply unpopular but somehow managed to get reelected anyway (possibly due to his opponent not running a particularly strong campaign,) sort of like when Bush defeated Kerry in 2004. (He is now out due to term limits.)

[Marcus_Ozius]

I think that there is a certain validity to saying that race is the trump card in American politics. Perhaps I have gone overboard with it in that context, but I think that the point stands in most cases. Living in the incredibly racially charged Detroit border regions, I can tell you from my own experience the impact that race and blatant race pandering/fear mongering has on a populace. I think that it's easy to go after what you call straw racists because arguing racism is the argument of last resort when a person has nothing else to stand on. It's a legitimate attempt to use an argument worthy only of straw men. A local example: Monica Conyers, a recently deposed city councilwoman from a very powerful Michigan family, claimed that the (successful) attempt to put her in prison for corruption was part of a racist plot, despite having had nearly the entire prosecution managed by members of the black community. Similar claims were made during many of the Detroit probes (Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick among others in recent memory), when a person has no point to stand on, they can claim race, and, while it doesn't always work, it's a hot issue that often galvanizes support for an unqualified person.
As for the local officials that you mention, Kjorteo, it was not my intent to imply that on a local level people didn't take some heat for what happened. I'm sure that the people who lived in the city had a very vested interest in knowing the names of, the people in power. However, the national perception differs from the local perception. Bush goes down in history as the bad guy for the nation, Blanco and Nagin take heat within their own spheres of influence.

[Dragom]

I think half of a Presidents job is to take the blame. Like a fancy scapegoat.

[Kjorteo]

Jon Stewart once said on a Daily Show segment that the Vice President's job is to be the President's rodeo clown.

[rickc]

xerxes wrote:

It's not a fair comparision in the least. Knowledge of the extent of this oil spill was unknowable beforehand, Katrina was seen coming a long ways off. Furthermore, the Katrina tragedy was compunded by the fact that Bush looked like he didn't care which was compunded even more when it became known that the head of FEMA was a know nothing political appointee, who, in turn, made sure that FEMA didn't even know how to do its job.

Hurricanes can be seen coming and braced for, oil spills, not so much.

Hurricanes can be seen coming and braced for.........Exactly! Then why did so many people choose to ignore the evacuation order? They were told it was a storm of astronomical proportions,and yet they decided to stay.There were literally thousands of vehicles ruined in the flood.Vehicles that could have been used to evacuate the area.The people of New Orleans made a decision to ignore an evacuation order,than they wanted to bitch about the government response to the flood.When the goverment did try to attempt rescues they had helicopters come under fire from thugs on the ground.If the residents of New Orleans were suffering so much,why were they looting stores like circuit city and best buy were no foodstuffs are contained? Was it Bush's fault that the people holed up in the superdome were robbing,raping,looting,and pillaging hours before the storm even came? The people of New Orleans that chose to stay should be billed for the rescue attempts,just like fools who go mountain climbing in a blizzard get billed for the rescue.New Orleans showed what a classless trashy shithole of a city they are during Katrina.Haiti has it a thousand times worse than New Orleans.The civil unrest in New Orleans made Hati look civil by comparison.How screwed up is that?The poorest country in the Western hemisphere behaves a thousand times better than New Orleans.Bush did not create the hurricane,and Obama did not destroy the oil rig.I do not blame the Presidents for the disasters.I do blame some of the residents of New Oreans for being total assholes.