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Do you remember the intelligence report that mentioned that Osama bin Laden intended to attack the United States that the President received a month before the 9/11 attacks?

I remember that memo, and the stink the Democrats made about it, even though anyone who has read the memo can clearly see that no specifics were included in the memo, and that it was only a background brief on the terrorism issue. The memo also stated clearly that no specifics and no leads were available but that there were a large number of investigations in terrorist activity being conducted by the FBI.

In this case, with New Orleans, the mayor and the governor were given fair warning that the hurricane was going to hit, or come very close to hitting New Orleans, and at the very least it was going to hit the Gulf Coast. The data regarding the path of the hurricane was quite specific that the highest probability path was going to wreak havoc on New Orleans.

It is also without a doubt that the insufficiency of the levees to stand up to a CAT 4/5 hurricane was well documented, and that the mayor and the governor were aware of that weakness.

It is without a doubt that a specific danger of flooding in the low lying city was a near guaranteed event in the case of a direct hit, and a high probability with a near miss. The probability cone for the hurricane's path in the last two days before landfall did not include the possibility for a complete miss.

In other words - there was a specific danger to New Orleans that was identified. There were probability cones and statistics that indicated that a disaster was inevitable by 48 hours before landfall. The mayor and the governor had a detailed map of exactly how the hurricane was going to come at the coast, what the dangers were, and more importantly - they had emergency plans to fall back on to alleviate the loss of human life.

The governor and the mayor both resisted Federal pleas for proactive measures satisfying themselves with half-hearted declarations and toothless mandatory evacuation orders. Half of the measures in their emergency plans were ignored for activities preceding the disaster, and a good number of common sense actions were forgotten in the time span following the disaster.

The media not surprisingly is blaming President Bush. It doesn't matter that the mayor and the governor had more detailed information about Hurricane Katrina than the President did about possible terrorist attacks in 2001. It doesn't matter that the President could not usurp the authority of the local officials without doing something drastic like declaring Federal martial law before Katrina made landfall, because that's the only thing the President could've done to have made a bit of meaningful difference, and by that act of competently mitigating the negative consequences of the disaster, he'd have doomed himself to an almost guaranteed impeachment, because if he'd taken positive action to prevent the worst effects of the disaster on human life, he would have canceled the justification for his declaration of martial law. And that was the pickle our President was in two Fridays ago. How could he prove that martial law was necessary to get around the governor's and mayor's obstruction to proper emergency measures, when by bypassing the governor and mayor he would've solved the problem, but left the governor and the mayor in a position to say that they would've done exactly what had been done, and that the declaration of Federal control over the disaster area 48 hours prior to Katrina's landfall constituted an illegal act...

And the funny thing is, I bet a lot of people on FR would side with the Democrats, because if the President had intervened in such a manner, we'd have no knowledge of how incompetent the Democrats have managed it, and the President would be up a brown, smelly creek without a paddle.