I think that Autoplectic has it right. Chertiff is not dumb and he's not lying. FEMA may have predicted thsi disaster -- do you know hwo much paper is sitting around in offices like his? (Or even mine?) I think Chertoff is out out of his depth as a lawyer, administrator (a USA is an administrator) and former judge. Ridge was probably a much better man for the job, at least governors have to deal with the kind of bureaucracies that deal with these emergencies.
Basically,. I don't think anyone wanted this to happen -- not Chertoff, not the Bushies, not Congress. The disaster, with all its class and race biases, totally inevitable in a divided and stratified society, mainly shows that we have no more clue about how to handle a major disaster here than we do the sirtuation in Irq. The only bright spot in the picture is that here, unlike there, we may actually learn somethimng from thed experience about how to do it better.
No doubt practicing as a lawyer has clouded, or affected, my judgment. And doing whatever is that each of us does likewise. That's a Marxist ABC.
jks
--- Autoplectic <autoplectic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/4/05, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > >I know Chertoff slightly. I think he's being
> honest. I
> > >doh't think he'd tell what he thought to be a lie
> if
> > >prompted ina briefing. He was, among other
> things, a
> > >(really good) US Attorney and a federal appellate
> > >judge, two things that give one an allergy to
> bald
> > >faced lying.
> >
> > Justin, what he's saying just isn't credible.
> Precisely what happened
> > in NO was widely forecast. FEMA had to have known
> it. How could he
> > say that they had no idea of the suffering in the
> convention center
> > when it had been all over the TV for days? If he's
> not lying, he's an
> > idiot, and you can't be an idiot and be a US
> attorney, can you?
> >
> > Doug
>
> ----------------------------
>
> It's not so much that he's lying or even that he's
> an idiot, it's that
> the skills he has are simply irrelevant to dealing
> with what happened.
> They don't teach civil/environmental engineering or
> logistics or
> operations research at law school or in seminars for
> DA's. In that
> sense, he's caught up in a network of incompetences
> and dissembly
> driven by our kakistocrat-in-chief.
>
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