YOU ARE BEING LIED TO

[CajunMama]

Let's not focus so much as who is to blame right now. We have thousands upon thousands of our fellow Americans who need our help. Expend your energy into helping them. Can't physically help? Talk to someone in your area...see if there are available homes and jobs for some of these people. Help them relocate and get started on a path back to a normal life.

[themusk]

Check the 7:55 am entry for 9/4 at http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

I think the Interdictor is saying pretty much what I have been saying. Stop politicizing this by blaming top officials when the real blame should be on the nature and structure of government and the entitlement mentality of a culture (all races and classes) which has come to depend on the government for the solution to all problems.

His sentiment isn't based on fact, at least when the game plan for disasters is followed. A lot of planning goes into identifying the possibilities beforehand, so that time isn't wasted, and there is a very clear quasi-military command and control structure called the "Incident Command System" that brings all the agencies together under unified command. The ICS system was first developed by firefighters, and you know they don't have time to dawdle and get signatures in triplicate.

One of the most obvious features of this crisis is that command and control broke down. Either people couldn't or wouldn't play by the ICS game plan. We've got dribs and drabs of evidence, from our vantage points, of where and how it broke down. But it will probably take months for enough information to become public for us, who are either distant from the crisis, or who are party to only one small corner of what is a mighty big picture, to really understand what went wrong.

I know one thing about the real world, and that it is rare that only one or two persons can alone create such a crisis, and it's rare for those persons who do make the bad decisions to act alone. Expect to see, in the end, a cascade of errors made by a number of people, probably at different levels and in different agencies.