Spoken like a true bureaucrat. As I noted previously, when someone is drowning, you throw them a life preserver even if the lifeguard says you can't. You have to be poltically tone-deaf to ignore the public response to the images on their TV screens.
I just saw an interview on our local Wash DC station. A local person with relatives in the Superdome saw what was happening on TV. She rented a minivan and drove down to the Superdome and took out her relatives out. They are now staying with her.
The only fault I see in the fed reaction was they did not have carbon copies of Rumsfield in each position, and they did not just tell the press to go to h-ll in strong terms from the beginning. Even then, what seems like bad media performance is 95% due to out of context quotes and spin by the media. If a democrat would have been in power the offical's best lines would have been quoted.
Agree that the MSM blew it out of proportion, but perception is more important than reality, at least in the short term. The public will not follow the investigations and what really happened. The Dems are still pushing the Gore beat Bush in Florida myth despite facutal evidence to the contrary.
Bush asked Pelosi "What do you think went wrong [at the federal level]?" and even according to her story she had no answer to the question and just called him names instead of answering.
Pelosi is a Dem hack and hag. She is just mouthing the Dem playbook--Blame Bush.
So the people in FEMA should have abandoned their jobs (organizing aid for the post 96 hour period), and instead rented minivans, and drove down to act as first-responders? Should they have pushed aside the State Officials at gunpoint who were blocking Red Cross from giving the food to the needy? The locals did not just fail, they actively stood in the way of the aid.