News Katrina damage is Bush's Fault!

... mother nature?

I've always had a feeling that she's to blame for a lot of things

 

I guess a hurricane isn't a person, but you could start by blaming that.

After that,

1) City planners who built a city on a river delta, largely below sea level.
2) Millions of people over the years who allowed so much of the city to fall into a state of disrepair.
3) Senators who authorized the war in Iraq, which diverted funding from the levees.
4) The Army Corps of Engineers (I don't think it's particularly fair to blame them, as their funding was cut, but levee maintenance is their job).

Outside of these, Bush is about the only one you could blame, primarily for cutting funding for the levees. Whether or not they would have held anyway probably isn't known, but even so. FEMA is not to blame in this at all. Their job is to respond to an emergency. They may have done this job terribly, but the physical damage to the city was already done by the time their responsibilities kicked in. The blame on FEMA lies in the area of human causalties rather than damage to the city.

If you believe that greenhouse gases have contributed to strengthening gulf hurricanes, then you can blame atmospheric polluters as well, but that's getting to be an awful stretch.

 

Well supposedly its directly his fault because an agency that doesn't take direct orders from him didn't do a perfect job after the disaster area's city and state governments failed to take action with their own established emergency procedures.

Completely bush's fault.

 

It was the levees breaking that caused most of the damage. Bush signed the budget that cut the maintenance funds for them, and you could argue it was necessary because of the war. It's hard to single out Bush for this, though, as the budget is put together by Congress.

 

And of course, what most people ignore is that the study for the levee improvements was alone going to take until 2008.

 

and of course...pengwuino...they also forget to mention that the portion of the levee that failed is the portion that had been improved.

 

The damage was caused by a storm and a long history of poor planning. The fact that Bush cut funding shows that he is at least as much of the problem as anyone else.

Some number of people who died can be traced directly to Bush's style of so called "leadership". For starters, the coffee boy that he appointed to head FEMA was too busy giving interviews on TV to do his job. And Bush was too busy playing golf, or whatever, while on yet another vacation. Oh yes, and half of the guard's equipment is in Iraq since it was too costly politically to imposed a draft in order to fight a war. If that equipment was here as it is suppposed to be, twice as many rescue helicopters would have been available in three of the affected states, for starters.

 

The dead people are Mayor Nagin's fault. The broken leevee is engineers' fault. The post hurricane chaos is FEMA's fault. The poor realization and acting upon those facts is Bush's fault.

 

To diminish the deaths caused by Bush is to spit in the face of every 911 victim.

 

You know you are not really supposed to glue yourself to the TV watching the hurricane deflower the New Orleans if you are the President. I'm sure there are more important things to do. The local authority, particularly the mayor Nagin, received his warning at least 3 days in advance. If you dont act upon the information of a category 5 storm then you are just as guilty of murdering those people as you are of malpractice.

 

None of that would have reduced any of the damage done to the city. From what I can tell, the OP was not asking who is responsible for human casualties. He specifically said "damage to the city." There are a hundred other threads devoted to blaming Bush for the deaths.

 

Well, the levees definitely should have been reinforced. However, I do understand why they held off. It's just like when you have a project which is due in 4 months, and you keep putting it off because you have more important things to do, like study for the next day's test, etc....

 

Well, there were plenty of inept government officials at every level who share the blame for the loss of lives (with the exception of the pigheaded people who had the means to evacuate but chose not to do so; they are responsible for themselves and have faced the consequences of their own poor decisions). But, in terms of the property damage, perhaps we need to go back in time and slap around the founders of the city who decided it was a good idea to build a big city in what should be a river delta?

 

Sounds like humans were put in charge...

Think we all know the weak link in this chain

 

If you had been paying attention, you'd have noticed there were two disasters. One was the hurricane, the other was the federal government ****ing up.