Nonpartisan

[mmcirvin]

I take back most of my disagreement with Reid Stott. Judging from the first part of his essay, when he says "nonpartisan" he still means it literally, instead of the usual modern meaning of "stop criticizing politician X", which has so corrupted the term that I have a hard time taking it at face value. I also have doubts about Ray Nagin's sainthood, and it's only if you see the whole thing as a zero-sum Republicans vs. Democrats game that picking on Nagin really exonerates Bush (it seems pretty negative-sum to me).

But it's really, really hard to be nonpartisan when criticizing the federal government if one party controls everything. You have to go looking for some Democrats to criticize somewhere else to get that nonpartisan glow. Maybe I can rent myself out as a token Democrat to criticize when you want to be nonpartisan and are absolutely at wit's end. If we lose a few more thousand people because of federal incompetence, I can go out and say something offensive on the teevee for a reasonable fee while waving around my motor-voter form from the RMV with the party check box on it.

Comments

Ignoring Katrina for the moment

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

Stott says that going into things half-supported because we really don't want to commit the needed forces is natural and nonpartisan. I'm not sure I agree it's not politically conditioned, but even so, there's still the choice of which things we go into with delayed support and which we don't go into at all. Do we choose to go undermanned into Bosnia and Kosovo, or into Afghanistan and Iraq, or into Rwanda and Sudan?

My name is sunburn and I'm a bozo.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Eh, you're always more fair than *I*, at least, gave you credit for. I apologize for my behavior in your LJ lately. While I'm not outraged directly at Bush, I'm outraged, and a little more overcome than I expected.

Re: My name is sunburn and I'm a bozo.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks... I actually think it's been relatively civil here, though that's mostly because it's low traffic compared to a popular politics blog.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

My feeling on the matter (having been through several ridiculous Fark comments threads on the subject) is that there's a fair amount of blame to go around at all levels of government in and above New Orleans, and that it's mostly partisan leanings that are making people focus either solely on the federal government (if you want to bash Republicans) or solely on the state and local levels in Louisiana and New Orleans (if you want to bash Democrats). There probably are people who have non-partisan reasons for focusing on one level of government to the exclusion of others, but my gut instinct is that most people who do so are doing so for partisan reasons.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, what I know about Louisiana politics you could fit in a thimble, but I've been watching the Bush administration for a while and actively tried to get them fired, so my emphasis is going to be predictable.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, of course everyone involved has been engaging in conscious blame-shifting. Josh Marshall's been trying to track down the origins of a false claim that Blanco didn't declare a state of emergency for days, which was repeated uncritically in several news outlets.

Probably a conflation

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

of Nagin's actual delay in ordering the evacuation with Rove's lame-ass attempt to blame Blanco for the delay in arrival of the troops.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I noticed the same sort of thing, in that my reaction was to trash the massive local failure (part of my probably figured they were democrats, but I don't recall conciously considering that) and part of me to regard FEMA's shortcomings as emblematic of big government. The result was that I wasn't being partisan, but my other biases were showing nonetheless.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

Interesting take. I think the way that most people are reacting, especially the news media, is to blame "whomever was in charge". When you've got Fox News bashing the administration, you have to know that something is up.

It's my understanding that the federal government accepted a letter on 27 Aug. (before the storm hit) from Governor Blanco, declaring a state of emergency. And at that time, she had passed the buck to the federal government.

To me, that says the federal government should have started actively evacuating people *before the storm hit*. It was chilling to me to see a huge parking lot full of 200 school buses in New Orleans, half-covered in water. If the feds had been able to wrangle 200 troops to come down quickly and drive those buses around the poor neighborhoods where people couldn't get out of town, they could have evacuated upwards of 10,000 people. The governor had earmarked $2,000,000 of the $9,000,000 for emergency protective measures to go towards evacuation support. Did the feds help at ALL with evacuation before the storm hit?

For me, at least, it's not political finger-pointing. It's a) who was in charge, and 2) what did, or didn't they do -- and why?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

It's true that the Feds have the manpower to man something like that, but that's really their only advantage over the city in that respect. Dare we say that busd rivers should be first-responders? I... dunno. Maybe. But that won't immunize them from criticism, as you can just picture the mayor or local officials griping to CNN that the Feds just bluntly pushed their people aside, snapped up all the transportation, and got whatever mixed results they came up with. Feds shouldn't interfere on the local government is equipped.

That said, should the Feds equip local governments who can't equip themselves? (Who shaves Sam the Barber?) Yes, I think they should. I think they should help equip them with plans, good plans-- from what I'm reading, the feds may have been, hmm, really extra-nonchalant about NO's problems fulfilling their duties to preserve and evacuate their population.

With advanced preparation of years, though, then I'd still prefer that the Federal evac support exist in the form of a checkbook and requirements for the local government to have a working plan, as opposed to sending 200 soldiers of god-knows-what skills or training to drive buses through bad weather in probably-foreign streets that may or may not be intact. One presumes that for every, say, 10 busses, the city has hired at least 9 drivers.

Actually, there's an idea-- how about a sort of civil servant emergency reserve force? Too expensive?

I recall hearing on NPR that a state of emergency was declared before the storm hit, recommended by Bush (or not, I dunno) as a means of freeing up funds (or promising funds) under some emergency relief fund. Does that mean the buck was passed? It sure doesn't mean that the governor's duties to her state ended. The Feds should start by acting *through* local authorities instead of airdropping Washington-based FEMA dolts to get in the way of any remaining authority the states and cities have left.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I would also like to add that, unlike Stott, I'm actually quite proud of much of the blogosphere response. If you dig deeper into those super-partisan or super-ideological rants, you'll actually find that many people involved pretty much agree with him on the substantive issues if not the meta ones; for instance, see the Nielsen Haydens' blog (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/), which normally is about as passionately Dem-partisan as they come. (The reason China Miéville found it easy to be nonpartisan is that he's an English Marxist; everyone in America is a ridiculous far-right stooge as far as he's concerned.)

I have, so far, only seen one (1) non-ironic mention of secret weather control machines. Maybe because I'm not looking in the right places. (However, I have seen a fair amount of outrageously racist barf about cannibals and such.)

The Sept. 11th attacks didn't unite America because we were better people then. They united America because

(1) it was a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy;
(2) it scared all of us half to death (I think a lot of that was actually thanks to the mysterious Mr. Anthrax in the subsequent days; wonder where he is now?)
(3) the victims did not run vastly poorer or blacker than the American mean—I speak not so much of conscious racism/classism here as of the general sense of social estrangement from people who seem different and aren't perceived as living the same way;
(4) Bush was still a new president and there was a desire to cut him some slack on those grounds.

And I suspect we'll soon be able to add that (5) there was no Refugee Problem to speak of.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Speaking of secret weather-control, I stumbled across a real black-helicopters conspiracy theory on IRC last night. This will probably also interest manfire.

This guy was saying that there have been confirmed (no doubt) accounts by NO police and some refugees that they witnessed armed, unmarked military units operating in New Orleans, before the federal response had really kicked into gear. This guy suspected they were there to secure sites of "national importance" and that the federal disaster response was deliberately delayed to give these ops-teams enough time to complete their secretive missions. Since this guy was concerned about various "virus labs" in the NO and Gulf Coast area, he suspected that securing those labs. At the same time, he's angry that there were "hundreds of troops" present and that instead of saving lives, they were "securing files."

I have logs if further proof of this insidious conspiracy is required. UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

[davetheinverted]

That essay may be the single most sensible thing I've seen anyone write on the subject.

Dav2.718

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Matt, I think you were right in the first place, and I don't see blaming the federal government as partisan, but I have a question, I haven't been reading that much blog stuff, and I'm wondering if when they try and be 'non-partisan' and blame the city, parish and state levels of government do they take into account that Louisiana is either the poorest or the second poorest state in the union?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

An excellent question, and the answer is "sometimes, sometimes not". One of the things that Nagin did have to deal with was that the city didn't have the money to do what it needed to do.

Reid's pretty much recanted his implication of a politics-free interval; he says it was just his way of hawking for donations, which is fine with me.

Miscellany

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

This scapegoat-for-hire scheme of yours reminds me of Mike Zeares, Total Bastard. Only time will tell if, like that bastard, you fail to convert this into any serious cash.

Also, I had to look up to see what the R in RMV stands for. Out here we have to DOL, Dept. of Licensing, which handles everything from pet licenses up to business licenses, with drivers' licensing in between.

Since Washingtonians speak a radically different language from Massachusetts residents, you may feel free to draw wide generalizations based on small differences in transliteration of our language.