Katrina disaster

It's hard to imagine the horror of what has transpired in New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama. The CAT5 storm ripped into the gulf area and has left a severe wound in our country. The flooding in New Orleans which has been predicted for decades has come to pass and the damage is of biblical proportions. Many of you like me probably have watched the story unfolding on TV. It's sad and tragic, even gory. This stuff is real and it's very bad!

I have sat and watched as many people in this country from their safe and dry homes (me too) have started blaming our President for this mess. I am dumbfounded by this but I guess their hatred for him and the republicans in general have just surfaced again and they take every opportunity to try and use whatever means necessary to make President Bush and his cabinet look bad.

The facts are fortunately in the favor of the feds in this case. If you know how politics work at all you know that local and state officials are charged with first responder duties in this kind of disaster. The feds normal do not get involved until they are asked by the state to step in. However in this case President Bush was proactive and had contacted both the governor and the mayor to urge them to evacuate before the storm hit. He was also planning the relief effort during that time and had a convoy eight miles long in New Orleans by Friday after the storm. The massive amount of food, water, equipment and man power was a very large operation which took days of planning to put together. FEMA was on the ground as of Tuesday the day after the storm although it was unreported by the main stream media.

So take it all in and listen to the people who let thousands die, try and blame it all on the evil republicans. The fact is the mayor failed to follow his own cities standing evac plan and remove the sick, old and poor first before evacuating everyone else. In fact rumor is that he came out and told them all that they were on their own for the most part.

My heart cries out for America again. Yet this disaster has made me feel oddly sad and mad at the same time due to the looting and misery that many have suffered through all the while folks are trying to assign blame to a man who had nothing to do with it and has responded as well as any President could have. I hate to see folks use a tragedy for political gain but I guess that is the nature of the beast.

God bless those folks in the gulf who are homeless, jobless and hungry. They are going to need allot of help to get their lives back together. I hope something good can come from this but I'm not sure what it is yet. I had always wanted to go to New Orleans, in fact my wife and I were planning a vacation there in February of 06. I suppose that is a vacation we will never take now. I am not sure if I want to ever go there.