Angry in the Great White North

From Michelle Malkin:

The delusional local journalists (or ghost writing local officials) give the game away at the end of this awful, blind editorial:

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

They have it entirely backwards. The President isn't supposed to "make our beloved communities work right again." He's supposed to find beloved communities already working right and assist them in recovering from disaster. That's how FEMA works--bottom up, not top down. Mississippi and Alabama apparently understood that before Katrina struck, as they haven't had anywhere near the level of chaos that New Orleans has had. It seems none of the elites in Louisiana understood the basics of federalism. And they still don't.

From the "top-down" approach of government comes Hillary Clinton:

With many blaming the growing scope of Katrina's devastation on the Bush administration, Sen. Hillary Clinton called yesterday for a 9/11-style probe into how the federal government responded to the crisis.

"It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared," Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Bush asking him to set up a "Katrina Commission."

"The slow pace of relief efforts in the face of a mounting death toll ... seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed," she said.

From the "bottom-up" side, former Bush-basher New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, being interviewed by CNN's Soledad O'Brien:

Nagin>> I got promises too. I can't stand any more promises. I don't want to hear any more promises. I want to see stuff done. That's why I'm so happy the president came down here because I think they were feeding him a line of bull also. They were telling him things weren’t as bad as it was, he came down and saw it and he put a general on the field. His name is general Honore. When he hit the field, we started to see action. What the state was doing, I don't friggin' know but I tell you, I am pissed. It wasn't adequate. The president and the governor sat down. Air force one, I said, Mr. President, Madam governor, you two have to get in sync. If you don't get in sync, more people are going to die.

...

And I said, Mr. President, madam governor, you two need to get together on the same page because the lack of coordination people are dying in my city.

...

They both shook their head, said yeah. I said great. I said everybody in this room is getting ready to leave.

O'Brien>> Was that done?

N>> The president looked at me. I think he was a little surprised. He said, no, you guys stay here. We're going to another section of the plane and we're going to make a decision. He called me in that office after that and he said, Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor. I said -- I don't remember exactly what -- two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

O>> You told me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?

N>> Yes.

O>> Regarding what? Bringing troops?

N>> Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the -- I was advocating a clear chain of command. So that we could get resources flowing in the right places.

O>> The governor said no?

N>> She said she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn't happen. And more people died.

Clinton might be on to a good idea, if only because a commission might actually report on the truth of how things are supposed to work, and that is from the bottom-up.

If there have been successes in New Orleans, it's only because the President has taken command where by all rights he is not supposed to, and gotten things done despite local officials. A commission could spell out those details.

But I expect such a commission would deliver a minority report in which all the Democrats eschew the truth for the politically expedience of blaming the White House for something that Mayor Nagin himself is blaming state officials for.

But then blaming Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco for delaying important decisions, or Mayor Nagin for not being prepared at the local level, doesn't help put another Clinton into the Oval Office.