Have the Democrats lost their minds?
Friday Mayor Nagin was on "Dateline" and he was asked about the city buses - and why they were not deployed. The exchange with Stone Philips went as thus:
SP: "What was mobilized? I mean were national guard troops in position. Were helicopters standing by? Were buses ready to take people away?"
MN: "No. None of that,"
SP: "Why is that?" (incredulous)
MN: "I dont know. That is question for somebody else."
When pressed, all he said was:
MN: "All I can do is [say] that I was dealing with it as a mayor -- how do I prepare my city for an incredibly powerful storm? So immediately we tried to get as many people out as possible."
Huh?
Mayor, you had a written plan. You had rolling stock. You not only did not use the rolling stock to get the people out, you didn't even protect the stock itself! You not only failed to evacuate 100,000 people, you also destroyed your school system's transportation capability.
Perhaps sensing that the mayor had really screwed himself by being backed into a corner (on Dateline no less, a left-leaning broadcast network program!), Landrieu went on the offensive.
Well, ok, she tried to.
See, she was on Fox News Sunday this morning talking about the hurricane.
She actually blamed President Bush for the failure of the New Orleans school buses to be dispatched to evacuate people from the city.
President Bush is in charge of city school buses? He writes the checks to the drivers? He decides when, where, and how they are parked - or driven?
What planet are these people from?Her view is that because of
alleged federal cuts in mass transit funding, the city could not run the buses.
Excuse me?
Ms. Landrieu, those are
SCHOOL buses. They operate under
CITY control, not
FEDERAL control. They are driven by
CITY employees (who work for the school district.) Employees that can be called into work and paid overtime to operate those buses.
In fact, she said:
"Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane," she said. "And it's because this administration and administrations before them do not understand the difficulties that mayors . . . face."
Landrieu then added: "In other words, this administration did not believe in mass transit. They won't even get people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out."
She's joking, right? She has to be joking.
Unfortunately, it appears that she was not.
Instead, one wonders if she has fallen off her meds.
Ms. Landrieu, let me remind you of a few tiny little things called facts.
- The City of New Orleans owns those buses, and staffs them. Every school day those drivers operate the buses to transport pupils to and from school. That is a city and state function, not a federal one.
- When a hurricane approaches, the buses don't suddenly become federal property. They are and remain state and city property. The drivers are and remain under city (or state) contract. A contract that the city (and/or state) negotiated, and which, given the nature of the comprehensive disaster plan that the city (and state) had authored and claimed to be willing to implement, should include the requirement that said workers operate said buses for the purpose of evacuation. If getting that "concession" requires paying some form of premium under these conditions, then so be it. The time to figure this out, and negotiate this, is BEFORE the hurricane is knocking on the door, by the way.
- When you fail in (1) and (2), you take responsibility for doing so, admit you screwed the pooch, and vow to sin no more.
Trying to cast blame on a politician that has no means of control of any kind over a particular situation is akin to a bank robber claiming at trial that he robbed the bank because President Clinton got a hummer under the desk from Monica. There really is that much connection between your alleged claims and what actually happened on the ground.
The judge would laugh at such a claim while sentencing said robber to his 20.
The public should likewise laugh at Ms. Landrieu while sentencing her to defeat in her next electoral contest.
In the meantime, may I encourage more Democrats to make such outrageously laughable charges as Ms. Landrieu did this morning, and to answer as Mayor Nagin did Friday evening.
And please - do so in more and more venues, and more and more different forms of media - even though I have noted that MSNBC and CNN apparently have cringed at the thought of reproducing these statements more widely, as I can't find them there.
The more of these sorts of comments that the public hears, and the more widely they're reported, the better - there is no better way to lose an election than by making it clear to the electorate that your cranial space contains an absolute vacuum - in this case, its pretty clear that even with rocks in there you'd not have been able to come up with this one.
