Posted 9/12/2005 05:46:00 PM by Douglas

If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press, and if it's Meet the Press, it's Tim Russert hitting some double speaking politician like a piñata. This week: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin:

MR. RUSSERT: Many people point, Mr. Mayor, that on Friday before the hurricane, President Bush declared an impending disaster. And The Houston Chronicle wrote it this way. "[Mayor Nagin's] mandatory evacuation order was issued 20 hours before the storm struck the Louisiana coast, less than half the time researchers determined would be needed to get everyone out. City officials had 550 municipal buses and hundreds of additional school buses at their disposal but made no plans to use them to get people out of New Orleans before the storm, said Chester Wilmot, a civil engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert in transportation planning, who helped the city put together its evacuation plan." And we've all see this photograph of these submerged school buses. Why did you not declare, order, a mandatory evacuation on Friday, when the president declared an emergency, and have utilized those buses to get people out?

MAYOR NAGIN: You know, Tim, that's one of the things that will be debated. There has never been a catastrophe in the history of New Orleans like this. There has never been any Category 5 storm of this magnitude that has hit New Orleans directly. We did the things that we thought were best based upon the information that we had. Sure, here was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can't find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren't available.

First and foremost, shut your fucking pie hole.

Secondly, no drivers could be found to "stay behind" with the hurricane bearing down on New Orleans? Are you listening to yourself?? I know hindsight is 20/20, but I'd bet 100 times the amount I've given to the Red Cross this week that there were hundreds of willing drivers, many of which might even be licensed bus drivers, that were willing to take those buses out of New Orleans, full of people that would now be eternally grateful. Has anyone told Mayor Nagin about the story of Jabbar Gibson?

Finally, no one is going to debate that there were 550 buses left flooded in New Orleans. That's a statement of fact and a testament of his poor planning and execution of his own City approved emergency evacuation plans. The debate will be why there were 550 buses left flooded in New Orleans when the City of New Orleans knew there was no other way to evacuate the people that lacked the means to get out if in fact a storm of this magnitude was headed their way, which didn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Cry for (and mispronounce) the [Federal] cavalry all you want, but that fails to erase your own lack of preparations before the storm got to your parish.