Email Received

Got this in the mail, and thought I would share... Sucks too, as I am a big Anne Rice Fan. I am sure her French Quarter Mansion is fine, by the by...
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Anne Rice blames America, not local officials.

"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us.
You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You
want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our
music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority
preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your
backs." - novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice
Let me get this straight.

Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies
below sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you
have the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi
River. All of which are above you.

Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you
are levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been
warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for
decades.

I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal
government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to
those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state
residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough
money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was
only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades
would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to
attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.

Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax
dollars on something else that they (and presumably you) found more
important, and then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for
these life-preserving necessities.

Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in
which there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I
can't throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick
leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and
incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with
Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our
darkest hours. You know the National Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki,
but the man was a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy
I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine.
Nobody's throwing around the adjective "Churchillian" about any of your
officials these days. We didn't pick your local officials; you guys did.

Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that
the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to
call for aid?"

Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the
Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana
Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those
who don't have personal vehicles. As JYB observes, "there is something very
peculiar about a city and a state that have a plan on the books for years
that outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a
hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan
and try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous
Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans."
(See more here.) Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he
had plenty sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded
and useless.

But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this
coming. They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them before and.
oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after that dodged
bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a better evacuation
plan.

I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other
parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and
subsequently collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet
somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order,
civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max style
post-apocalyptic tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has
turned out to be nightmarishly prescient.

We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed.
You might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the
levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost their
head in a crisis.

Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal
element incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the
forces of law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a
charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs.

If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny
minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy.
Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an
opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that
reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that
thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon.

I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local
officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent
turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police
superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to
refresh your memory - four years ago, New York and Washington, planes
falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming
next. and the cops, among others, showed up to work.

To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch
in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military
rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're
going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In
the near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom
of building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.) And
if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest
of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less "you
failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson."

- Jim Geraghty is reporting from Ankara, Turkey, where the locals
keep asking him how something like this could happen in America.