Korean Job Discussion Forums

[wannago]

[EFLtrainer]

[wannago]

[EFLtrainer]

[wannago]

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

Amended text in bold print:

BBE: I agree with you that the list of factors that contributed to this mess is growing, if that was your thinking when you posted your message in the context of all the other Katrina-related postings here:

Start with settlement patterns and city planning over time, particularly the encroaching onto the so-called buffer lands, as Rapier points out;

add Bush's slashing of the funding of the levees, at least as far as maybe this might have mitigated some of the damage;

add the destructive nature of this highly powerful storm itself;

add the mayor's disorganization and lack of preparedness (claims he couldn't find drivers for buses...and now CNN is reporting that AmTrack offered a train, he refused, and 900 empty seats pulled away just a day or two before the storm hit);

add the no-fault chaos and confusion that goes hand-in-hand with events of this magnitude; and

add the Bush Administration's slow and incomptent response, particularly the President's failure to personally energize the system...given the nature of this disaster, he should have got involved immediately...

and you've got a tentative -- but far from complete -- explanation for why many suffered, apparently uneccesarily.

Brown, of couse, being the scapegoat of the week, allows Bush to brush off some of the mud that was on his hands, at least for the moment, but it still does not change the nature of this administration one iota.

I'll expect the commissions to produce more complex (and of course, politically charged) explanations. But this would seem to be a good start.

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

EFL Trainer: Exchanging views is not about "putting people on hooks" or "letting them off the hook."

It's just about exchanging views. So please relax.

I might point out that if we're going to say that these levees, which I'm hearing totally failed -- CNN is reporting 90% failure in the levee system -- might have held back the flooding had Bush but funded more studies or better funded the levees, and that this might have mitigated the suffering (and I think there might actually be something there, by the way, but not much), then we also need to acknowledge that had the mayor used those buses and taken advantage of AmTrack's offer, then that, too, might have mitigated the suffering -- that is, it's not about saving all of the people who suffered as much as saving as many as you can, and he seems to have failed to do this...

Of course, the primary "bad guy" here is still Katrina, however, and not Bush or the New Orleans mayor, in spite of the fact that, if we were going to point fingers, again, we wouldn't have enough fingers to point at all of the guilty or liable parties...it seems to have been a system-wide failure: local, state, and federal. It supercedes the regular partisan bickering. The die-hard partisans just don't know this yet.

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

On your first issue: if you stopped behaving like an angry district attorney who wants to be governor next year, it would be much easier to exchange views with you. (this is delivered half-seriously, and half-joking, and in a friendly way... )

I feel extremely confident that others here would second this recommendation. Indeed, they already have elsewhere.

Here's your second issue:

[BigBlackEquus]

[EFLtrainer]

[Gopher]

[EFLtrainer]