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24 hrs after Bush said get NG-MPs into NO they were there. 3 days too late.

What do you think they were doing the first two days - sitting around with a six-pack and watching game shows until the President finally gave an order? An awful lot of logistics and staging was accomplished in those two days, with huge amounts of equipment, supplies and people being flown into the staging zones and getting prioritized and loaded. Converging all of these capabilities toward the disaster zone but sufficiently holding them back to not lose them to the hurricane started following the federal disaster area declarations on Saturday.

Vast amounts of resources were already staged before Monday. The chopper ride from Baton Rouge is about 1 hour, from Jackson Mississippi around 2 hrs max, and from Shreveport a little over 2 hours...It is my opinion (to which I think I am entitled without derision) that the BS agrument about how difficult it is to mobilize doesn't hold water (sorry about the reference) in the 21st century. If that is the way relief efforts are to be expected to respond they are worthless. After the Mayor failed to properly implement the evacuation plan and implement it early enough, the basic problem was the miserable failure of the LA governor to properly deploy and yes pre-deploy the LANG with the dual mission of security and relief and to execute quickly behind Katrina. (I don't relieve the LANG leadership either) Second major failure was The same incompetent Governor failing to request federal help when it became immediately apparent it was needed. Third comes the inadequate early response by FEMA and federal deployment of major military resources by the President. But to propose that the military (NG and Active) and FEMA moved as quickly as they could given the technology available to them and that Bush focused like a laser as early as he should have is just not right in my opinion. This is obviously a debate that will not go away and the facts are the facts. Believe what you want. I chose to believe we could have executed better. I think even I could have and I am sure if the problem were posed to the family of Freepers before not after the fact we all would have demanded faster movement on the spot. Now that the blame game has started positions have to be taken and protected. We will see. Meanwhile the suffering continues.