If there ever was a need.

I've purposely stopped myself from writing over the past seven days. It was a conscious exercise on my part to see how the world would react. Much to my chagrin, it has reacted as I feared it would. Panic and distress have given rise to pettiness and stupidity. At no other time in the history of the United States of America has such a visible need presented itself to the world and screamed for assistance. What it got instead was finger pointing and bickering over things that are completely meaningless. For such a time as this.

One of the key ideas I watched unfold was how the tragedy and utter despair wrought upon lands I once roamed would be blamed on President Bush. Like a firestorm to the tinder of an arid landscape, the media and the local government in Louisiana have screamed like a stuck pig and blamed everything on the federal government. People far and wide have used this living horror as an excuse to bash the president and further the hate mongering against his administration. And to what end? Stupidity requires no solution.

Note the following from Bryan Preston of JunkYardBlog.Net who is writing at Michelle Malkin's site:

Instead of acknowledging the faults that lie at city level and stepping in to organize relief efforts, Louisiana and New Orleans officials spent most of last week lashing out at the Bush administration, though its response was three times faster than the response to hurricane Andrew just 13 years ago. Government actually got quicker at doing something, in spite of the massive increase in the number of lawyers on the public dime in the intervening years. The locals blamed the feds even though the administration, whatever its faults, was ahead of all local officials when it came to declaring a state of emergency and requesting a mandatory evacuation. A massive butt-covering exercise is underway in Louisiana as I write, so massive it is second only to the actual relief and law and order efforts going on in the vast Katrina destruction zone.

Further, this absolutely fantastic piece from a DoD press conference with Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum:

Some people asked why didn't we go in sooner. Had we gone in with less force it may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a fight between the Guard military police and those who did not want to be processed or apprehended, and we would put innocents' lives at risk. As soon as we could mass the appropriate force, which we flew in from all over the states at the rate of 1,400 a day, they were immediately moved off the tail gates of C-130 aircraft flown by the Air National Guard, moved right to the scene, briefed, rehearsed, and then they went in and took this convention center down.

[SNIP]

The real issue, particularly in New Orleans, is that no one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans. Once that assessment was made, that the normal 1500 man police force in New Orleans was substantially degraded, which contributed obviously to less police presence and less police capability, then the requirement became obvious and that's when we started flowing military police into the theater.

Two days ago we flowed 1400 military policemen in. Yesterday, 1400 more. Today 1400 more. Today there are 7,000 citizen soldiers -- Army National Guard, badge-carrying military policemen and other soldiers trained in support to civil law enforcement -- that are on the streets, available to the mayor, provided by the governor to the mayor to assist the New Orleans police department.

I am absolutely confident that the security situation as it has improved in the last 24 hours will improve two-fold in the next 24 hours, and soon it won't be an issue at all.

[SNIP]

Q: One quick follow-up. Is it fair to say, using the convention center as an example, that one reason it took until Friday to get aid in is the National Guard needed time to build up a response team with military police to ensure law and order because the New Orleans Police Department had degraded so much?

GEN. BLUM: That is not only fair, it is accurate. You've concisely stated exactly what was needed, and I told you why. We took the time to build the right force. The outcome was superb. No lives hurt, nobody injured. It was done almost invisibly.

That, right there, is the truth from the man running the show on the ground. There was no failure in response on the part of the federal government. There was total failure on the part of the local government in New Orleans. The police department, school district, and every other level of command and control from the local government suffered catastrophic failure.

The average person is incapable of conceiving the true power of a hurricane until you've lived through it. Hurricanes are one of the top three most deadly natural forces this planet has ever known. With that in mind, I cannot wholly fault the failures of the local government. Their plan should've worked better (or at least have been tried in the case of the busses for evacuations) but this storm was a monster and no amount of planning can deal with that.

What I can fault the local government on is how they play the blame game with the federal government. It is very easy to play on the blind hate of many people toward the president and the government he represents. It is despicable to shuck responsibility for the deaths of many due to the flawed or nonexistent execution of faulty plans. The federal government assessed the situation, formed a plan, and executed that plan flawlessly as Lt. Gen. Blum outlined with rationale in his press conference. To deny that fact in the storm of stupidity that is the governments of the state of Louisiana is criminal.

Moreover, it is grandly abhorrent to make anything an issue of race. There is a singular reason why everyone you see on TV coverage is black. They're the only ones left. New Orleans is a predominately black city and tens of thousands of them refused to listen to the screams of their mayor to evacuate. I understand that some people physically could not and would need help, but there is a point at which you say it's time to hit the road even if I have to walk. Human beings are created with a psychological mechanism for survival. The densest among us realizes this at some point.

Every black caucus Senator and every nut job activist like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton do incalculable damage every time they open their mouths. It is repressible to take the suffering of tens of thousands and the deaths of the as yet uncounted and politicize it for the furtherance of a goal that is so ill-defined that it boggles the mind as to how the offenders are able to button their pants in the morning.

This presents an opportunity. A time and a place has been designated for the good in this country, and even in this world, to shine forth with the charity of brotherhood; to rise up with a loud voice and call out evil for what it is; to pick up those who are downtrodden, hopeless, lost, and without. For such a time as this.