As we approach yet another hurricane season, I thought I would post the
story below. Just to recap, hurricane Katrina hit the US mainland on Sunday,
August 28 with the eye making landfall about 60 miles east of New Orleans.

During the night of Sunday to Monday, a couple of the levees keeping New
Orleans dry, buckled letting water into the city.

The media horrified us with tales of woe, disaster, misery on a biblical
scale and ripped the cloaks of secrecy to reveal the total ineptitude of the
government.  For days we mentally steeled ourselves for massive piles of
bodies that would create health problems not seen since the Black Death
galloped through Europe centuries ago.

I even read stories of helicopter gunships roaring through the skies
machine-gunning poor people.  The media was in a total feeding frenzy as
they all tried to outdo one another in "recounting" tales of depravity,
misery and disaster.

The only problem is that none of it was true.  The media made up stories,
people believed them and to this day Katrina is thought of as the low point
in US history.

I pointed to a story a few months after Katrina that described how the media
misled us, but as the story below illustrates, we had no idea how truly bad
the reporting was.  

When Katrina hit, the mayor of New Orleans, Ray "chocolate city" Nagin
predicted 10,000 people dead in NO alone.  Yet it turns out that about 1000
people died in all of Louisiana.

When one realizes the size of Katrina and the damage it wrought, one has to
wonder why the death toll was so low.  This storm was the size of the
British Isles, with a 30+ foot storm surge and winds of up to 140 miles per
hour.  It hit an area where millions of people live.

I have been to New Orleans many times and I have traveled on I-10 between
Houston and Mobile many times.  The Gulf is right there; there are no cliffs
for the storm surge to go over, New Orleans is below sea level.  And in
August/September, it is HOT.  If you do not have water to drink, you will
not last long.

We derided the first responders, the mayor, the governor, FEMA, the
president, everybody.  The media was telling us, on live TV, that people
were shooting each other, that gangs were roaming the cities, looting,
pillaging, raping and murdering.  We were told rescue helicopters were being
shot at and so they retreated.  We were told people in the Superdome were
dying in countless numbers, with no food, water or protection.  It was
Dante's Inferno, but on a much wider scale and the US government and
military was unable to do anything.  Indeed, the media told us that the
National Guard was all in Iraq fighting for oil.

What the media avoided telling us was how come the death toll was so low.
When the truth started coming out, the media quickly changed the story and
moved on to the next contrived event.  I have heard the mainstream media
being referred to as the "Drive By Media," in reference to the fact they
make up stuff, attack somebody and move on to do the same to someone else,
similar to drive by shooting.  I think this is a very apt description.

The real story was totally ignored by the Drive By Media who would rather
lie than report good deeds by the military and the government.  In fact, it
is my belief the lies, distortions and fabrications from the Drive By Media
actually hampered rescue efforts and made things more difficult.  Yet the
media does not pay a price for this, and that's amazing.

Yesterday, I found the story below.  It explains what really happened during
and right after Katrina.  We now know why the death toll, while still
substantial, was in fact so low.  It is a tale of heroism, professionalism,
dedication and self-less devotion to one's fellow man.  It makes me very
proud to be an American and my faith in the US military and National Guard
is well placed.

Art, this one's for you buddy!  To you and your fellow Guardsmen:  well done
and thank you!


Denys




May 23, 2006 
Katrina: What the Media Missed
By Lou Dolinar

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths
resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina?
The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here's another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National
Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed,
dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen
running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to
ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also
included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first
responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional,
parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its
headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the
media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be
in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control,
not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard's main command ran at least 2,500 troops
who rode out the storm inside the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus
boats, dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a triage and
medical center that handled up to 5,000 patients (and delivered 7 babies).
The Guard command headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police,
firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm knocked out local
radio, as well as other regular military and other state Guard units.

Jack Harrison, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Arlington,
Virginia, cited "10,244 sorties flown, 88,181 passengers moved, 18,834 cargo
tons hauled, 17,411 saves" by air. Unlike the politicians, they had a
working chain of command that commandeered more relief aid from other Guard
units outside the state. From day one.

There were problems, true: FEMA melted down. Political leaders, from the
Mayor to Governor to the White House, showed "A Failure of Initiative", as a
recent House report put it. That report, along with sharply critical studies
by the White House and the Senate, delve into the myriad of breakdowns,
shortages and miscommunications that hampered relief efforts. 

Still, by focusing on the part of the glass that was half-empty, the
national media imposed a near total blackout on the nerve center of what may
have been the largest, most successful aerial search and rescue operation in
history.

"The Coast Guard, the National Guard, the military in general performed
heroically," said Sen. Robert Barham, R-Oak Ridge, who monitored the
Superdome operation from Baton Rouge as head of the Louisiana State Senate's
Homeland Security Committee. His opposite number in the Louisiana House,
Rep. Francis Thompson, D-Delhi, said, "They (the Guard) did a yeoman's job."
Both said they were getting very different pictures from TV than they got
from the Guardsmen at the Dome, and the state fish and wildlife department,
another key player in the rescue operation. 

"TV of the Superdome was perplexing to most folks," Thompson said. "You had
them playing the tapes of the same incidents over and over, it tends to bias
your thinking some, you tend to think it's worse than it really is."
Official estimates at this point suggest the Guard, working from the Dome,
saved 17,000 by air and uncounted thousands more by boat.

Let's try that again: The cavalry wasn't late. It didn't arrive on Thursday
smoking a cigar and cussing. It was there all along. 

The National Guard's response to Katrina was even more robust than I
suspected in my reporting for RealClearPolitics in September, and in more
detail for National Review, where I revealed for the first time that rescue
operations saved up to 50,000 lives, with perhaps an equal number making
their way to shelters on their own.

Fifty thousand New Orleans residents were in danger of death from drowning,
heatstroke, dehydration and disease. That was a tough one to get through the
media reality-distortion field, but the numbers have since been confirmed by
Congress, the White House, Louisiana state officials and the relevant
agencies themselves. If anything, I understated the size of the rescue
effort. What I didn't understand was the critical role the Superdome
headquarters played.

I initially heard about the Dome headquarters from Maj. John T. Dressler,
who serves with the National Guard Bureau in Washington D.C, an organization
that coordinates efforts of State Guard units which serve under their
respective governors. Dressler was present in the command tent there and
pulled together after-action reports for the Guard as a whole from its
fifty-plus individual state commands. His account was so far at variance
with the picture the media portrayed that I suspected a hoax, as did my RCP
editor. As it turns out, various Guard documents, personal memories, and
sworn testimony support his story, which in Louisiana is no great secret.
It's just the rest of the country that's been kept in the dark.

This is how it happened:

As has been reported, when the Superdome was established as a shelter of
last resort on the weekend before Katrina hit, the Louisiana National Guard
sent several hundred soldiers there who were trained in policing and crowd
control. They also, as rarely noted, stocked huge quantities of combat
rations, also known as Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), and water, both of which
were never in short supply, according to Maj. Ed Bush, who was inside the
Dome the whole time.

Dressler said that about 2,000 other troops, MREs and water were stationed
at armories and schools around the city, mini-versions of what the Guard had
set up in the Dome. They had about 50 high-water vehicles available, and two
dozen boats. Some satellite sites and equipment would later be put out of
business by flooding. Elsewhere in the state and around the country, another
6,000 troops were standing by. 

As these preparations were underway, National Guard helicopters dispersed
out of state away from the storm, which was standard operating procedure.
Like the Coast Guard (also running by a detailed playbook), they later
circled south behind Katrina and followed the storm into the city. Thus
there were up to 64 National Guard helicopters that began rescue operations,
as well as critical reconnaissance that revealed more details of the
breached levees, arriving Monday afternoon and into the evening. Because of
high winds, it literally was impossible for help to arrive any sooner.

The main operations headquarters for the National Guard was at the Jackson
Barracks in the hard-hit Ninth Ward, which began flooding after nearby
levees breached early Monday, a critical fact that wasn't clear at many
levels of government until the next day. In one of those ironies of military
operations, this crisis may have ended up saving lives. Most of the staff
was local, with three liaison officers from the National Guard Bureau in
Washington. Long before they had aerial recon, Guard commanders knew by
9:00am that their city was in deep trouble, with water about 20 feet deep
around the barracks. (This was about the time that TV anchors were reporting
the city had "dodged a bullet".)

They contacted the National Guard Bureau in Washington via satellite phone
for more help. That led officials at the national level to call a noon
teleconference among all 52 state guard commanders, who got a laundry list
of what the locals needed. The result was that more helicopter search and
rescue teams began arriving late Monday from as far away as Wisconsin, close
behind the original batch, mostly local, that tracked the storm in. 

The procedure ran under a system known as EMACs (Emergency Management
Assistance Compacts), a mutual aid pact among states. The conference call
became a daily routine that was New Orleans' primary lifeline to outside
aid. It bypassed local officials and the fouled-up federal chain of command
that led to much publicized infighting among the Governor, FEMA and the
White House. According to the Senate Select Committee on Katrina, "This
process quickly resulted in the largest National Guard deployment in U.S.
history, with 50,000 troops and supporting equipment arriving from 49 states
and four territories within two weeks. These forces participated in every
aspect of emergency response, from medical care to law enforcement and
debris removal..." the report said. All from the Superdome.

Meanwhile, late Monday, Louisiana National Guard HQ moved its high tech
"unified command suite" and tents to the upper parking deck of the
Superdome. This degraded communications for about four hours but ultimately
gave them satellite dishes for phone and Internet connections to the outside
world, Wi-fi, plus radios that were the only talk of the town. Helicopters
and boats, as we noted, were already bringing in survivors there. About
fifty men and women, black and white, worked per shift, equipped with maps,
laptops, phone and radios to coordinate the rescue operation. The rescuers
called it the "eagles' nest". 

The operation was impossible to hide or ignore and some news outlets may
have mentioned it in passing. Still, I haven't seen anything reported that
sounded like what the two Majors described Tuesday morning: helicopters
landing every minute; big ones, like the National Guard Chinooks, literally
shaking the decking of the rooftop parking lot; little ones like the
ubiquitous Coast Guard Dolphins; Black Hawks everywhere, many with their
regular seats torn out so they could accommodate more passengers, standing.
Private air ambulance services evacuating patients from flood-threatened
hospitals. Owners of private helicopters who showed up to volunteer, and
were sent on their way with impromptu briefings on basic rescue needs.
Overhead, helicopters stacked in a holding pattern. 

By the end of the week 150 National Guard aircraft were operating, plus
regular military and Coast Guard units who also dropped off survivors. The
biggest problem rescuers faced, according to crew members I've interviewed,
was the danger of aerial collisions.

This is at the Superdome, remember, supposedly Ground Zero for bad behavior
and the scene of massive governmental incompetence. 

Also hard to ignore at the Dome was another big operation: support for local
first responders. This effort included many of the black local heroes among
the police and firefighting squads, despite misleading media reports leaving
the impression they had either fled the city or walked off the job. The
majority of local police and firefighters were available, though their
communications system had been wiped out. They quickly hooked up with
pre-positioned Guard units, as well as an army of volunteers in everything
from flatboats to airboats. "We were just handing out radios to anyone who
wanted one," Dressler said.

The distribution of extra National Guard radios also helps explain why
deaths were much lower than the 10,000 anticipated, even though the city's
emergency services comm network had been knocked out. National Guard
communications, limited by range, were far from perfect, but better than
nothing. In some cases, Dressler said, helicopter crews called for firemen
equipped with axes and power saws, picking them up and dropping them on the
roofs of submerged buildings to pry survivors from attics. Conversely, when
boat crews picked up survivors who were near death from dehydration, they
could call in helicopters for quick evacuation. 

In military jargon, the radios were a "force multiplier," as was aerial
recon. The latter enabled police and fire rescues to be prioritized for the
most desperate. Dressler said the Guard was controlling more than 200 boats,
most of which were run by mixed crews of Guardsmen, police, firefighters,
volunteers and officers of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and
Fisheries. Later in the week, when reports of rioting and looting broke out,
the Guard set up a special transportation unit of high water vehicles to
whisk police and sheriffs' teams to trouble spots. Thousands of survivors
came to the Dome by boat, thanks to police and firefighters and the rest of
the rescue flotilla. Between the radios and first-hand reports from pilots
and boat crews coming in, the comm center at the Dome had a good feel for
what was going on in their city - something the media utterly lacked.

Besides rescuers and local first responders, another big story at the Dome
was the medical center. Like a Chinook helicopter landing on your roof, that
sure was hard to miss. Fifteen doctors and a total of 65 medical personnel
set up at the New Orleans Arena, within spitting distance of the Dome. It
was primarily for survivors brought in by air and boat, but also for people
in the Superdome with medical problems. There was never any shortage of
medical care, Dressler and Bush both said. 

The Arena medical center cycled through triage and treatment of up to 5,000
injured or sick victims, Dressler said. Those in the worst shape were
evacuated to the New Orleans airport and out of the region, those in good
shape hydrated and sent to the Superdome. The success of the makeshift
medical center was such that there were just six deaths at the entire
Superdome complex: four of natural causes, one drug overdose, and one
suicide during the week of supposedly rampant anarchy and death. 

Triage (there was another medical facility at the airport) may have been the
most critical element in limiting deaths once the levees broke and the city
flooded. Rescue operations were brisk, but survivors of that kind of trauma
aren't always coherent or aware of their own life-threatening injuries,
particularly dehydration. Absent care, hundreds if not thousands could have
died even after they were rescued and brought to the Dome. 

Most of the national media also neglected to mention the seven babies that
National Guard physicians delivered, something Maj. Ed Bush said he pointed
out repeatedly. Overall, the false claims of up to 200 dead at the Dome,
including murder victims, had clueless FEMA officials showing up at the end
of the week with a refrigerated 18-wheeler to claim the stacks of bodies. 

In all this time, Dressler said, "We didn't see a single camera crew or
reporter on the scene. Maybe someone was there with a cell phone or a
digital camera but I didn't see anyone." This was in the headquarters area.
Maj. Ed Bush, meanwhile, did start seeing reporters on Tuesday and
Wednesday, but inside the Dome, most were interested in confirming the
stacks of bodies in the freezers, interviews with rape victims, he said, and
other mayhem that never happened. He pitched the rescue angle and no one was
interested. A few reporters and film crews did hitch rides on helicopters,
came back, and produced stories of people stuck on rooftops, not stories
about rescues, he said. 

Neither Maj. Bush nor Dressler saw TV until the end of the week. They were
aghast. Apart from sporadic mentions, the most significant note taken of
this gigantic operation was widespread reporting of the rumor that a sniper
had fired on a helicopter. What were termed evacuations in some cases,
rescue operations in others, were said to have been halted as a result. "I
never knew how badly we were being killed in the media," Maj. Ed Bush says.
In reality, the only shots fired at the Guard were purely metaphorical and
originated with the media. Rescues continued 24/7 at a furious pace. 

In the end, the media timeline was exactly backwards. The bulk of all
rescues took place on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and began tapering off
on Thursday, officials say. Their account is buttressed by a Washington Post
poll of survivors, which indicates that 75 percent of the survivors who had
been trapped and rescued were picked by Thursday, and virtually all were
picked up by the end of the week. 

In other words, by the time the cliche "long-awaited help" arrived, in the
form of a visually-stimulating cigar being chomped by a cussing Lt. General
Russel L. Honore, the worst was over. The majority of trapped survivors were
out of the direst straits and awaiting evacuation.

They weren't happy campers. Besides the smelly but safe Superdome, which was
not a pleasant place, many had been dropped off on the nearest high ground,
primarily Interstate overpasses, in the rush to clear rooftops and attics.
There were genuine shortages of food and water at these locations,
especially at the Convention Center, another drop-off point. They were
stuck, as search and rescue and lifesaving continued. 

The biggest story everyone missed was that the guys in charge - and you're
entitled to your own political persuasion here - weren't out-of-touch FEMA
bureaucrats, or a president somewhere fund-raising, or a paralyzed governor
in Baton Rouge, or a mayor hanging out with his crew at a posh hotel a block
away. 

Except for the Coast Guard's brilliant performance, which saved up to 30,000
lives, most of the rescue operation was run by local National Guard middle
management, combat tested in Iraq, accustomed to hardship, and intimately
familiar with the city. (In fact, as I previously reported, Guard members
rescued other Guard members, who then reported for flight duty.) The junior
officers munched the same unappetizing but adequate rations as everyone else
at the Dome. They were struggling to catch a few winks when they could in
the garage level under the LZ, with concrete chips raining down on them when
the Chinooks landed and rattled the decking. 

Like everyone except the TV anchors, they squatted to do their business in
the nearest stairwell. "You just walked down the steps, and when you hit
water, there you were," Major Dressler recalls fondly. "We had a little
boy's stairwell, and a little girl's stairwell."

They were, in other words, on the scene, and they knew exactly the
grotesqueries in the Dome and in the rest of the city. The priorities were
search, rescue and lifesaving, not the comfort level of survivors they
rescued who they knew would survive somehow if they sorted out the sick from
the healthy. It looked brutal on TV, but it was effective, giving a whole
new meaning to that venerable military cliché "quick and dirty."

Someone should have told them that's not how real Americans are supposed to
act when they could be on national television. But they weren't watching TV,
so they didn't even have a political or PR motive to appear to be doing
something. They were too busy. 

The true story of the Dome accounts for a lot of what looked liked official
incompetence. Some specific examples:

--Why didn't the Guard fly in porta-potties as the crowd at the Dome stewed
in its own rich and savory juices? Well, toilets worked through Tuesday
afternoon, and by stinky Wednesday, search and rescue missions continued to
ramp up and still had the highest conceivable priority. Had helicopters been
diverted, people trapped in attics, on rooftops, and in broken-down
hospitals would have died. Other apparently brutal behavior, such as
ignoring visible corpses scattered around the city, were also seen as a
distraction from the main task. 

--Many survivors in the Dome complained of food and water shortages, a
charge that reverberated through the media echo chamber. According to Maj.
Bush, the Guard stuck to strict rationing - one MRE and one liter of water
per day, exactly what troops got in combat in Iraq. Because so many victims
were being brought in so quickly in an open-ended rescue operation, the
Guard wasn't taking any chances of running out of supplies by opening an
all-you-can eat buffet. It started out with a 3-day supply for ten thousand
people, and ultimately brought in 300,000 MREs and 397,000 liter bottles of
water, a 30-day supply for 10,000 people. And as Maj. Bush points out, there
wasn't a single death from dehydration - a constant threat to those waiting
to be rescued from rooftops and attics in the 100-degree heat and in the
steamy atmosphere of the Dome as well.

--Why wasn't the Superdome evacuated sooner? National Guard officials on the
scene saw no need for it until Thursday, and they were right. First, all
resources at their disposal were, quite correctly, focused on search and
rescue and lifesaving, rather than on re-supply and the comfort level of
those saved. Had they deployed helicopters for marginal tasks, people still
stuck on rooftops or languishing in powerless hospitals would have died.
When rescues began to taper off on Thursday, they began to shift resources
to evacuation. In other words, they had a plan: rescue, triage, hydrate,
evacuate. Not exactly rocket science, but if you leave out the rescue and
triage part, as the national media did, the rest makes no sense. The Guard
spent the week after Katrina in an exquisite balancing act between the needs
of healthy survivors in the Dome, the care of the sick and injured in the
Arena, and hauling in the tens of thousands who faced death on rooftops and
in attics. Then they could worry about getting the hell out of town.

--Why did the evacuation take so long? The full evacuation proceeded rapidly
once it began on Thursday, Maj. Dressler said. Once again, however, the use
of the Superdome as a staging area distorted perceptions: Even as the
previously rescued were being bused away, more were arriving by helicopter,
boat, and under their own power as rescue operations reached a crescendo.
The new arrivals delayed the completion of evacuation until well into the
weekend.

To be fair to the national media, there were good reasons the rescue angle
was grossly underreported. For the first few days, no one was keeping close
track of numbers. Nor was there a "center" for the media to cover since most
of the reporters were stuck elsewhere, away from the action. The rescuers
themselves, which also included the Coast Guard and local first responders,
knew they saved a lot of lives, but feared how many thousands, or even ten
of thousands, may have been left behind to fill the 25,000 body bags on
hand. With Mayor Nagin predicting up to 10,000 dead, no one was in any mood
to crow. 

It was a week and a half before anyone saw a glimmer of hope. That was when
boat crews began a formal, gridded house-by-house search, leading to
cautious reports on Sept. 8 that "Katrina death toll could be lower than
feared," but no one was ready to say how much lower. By then, however, the
view of Katrina as a massive governmental screw-up had been set in concrete,
and it wasn't until Oct. 5 that the intense official search for bodies
ended, with a toll of 972 in Louisiana, a number that has since crept slowly
upward to about 1,300. 

And there were screw-ups. The lead-up to Katrina took decades and cut across
party lines. More resources could have been put in place in the few days
before the hurricane struck. More could have been done to evacuate,
particularly for the sick and elderly. But once the levees burst on Monday,
it is hard to make a case that many more lives could have been saved - and
that's the bottom line in any disaster. 

"We had a major city destroyed," said Dr. James Jay Carafano, a Homeland
Security expert at the Heritage Foundation. "If it had happened in any other
country on the planet, tens of thousands of people would have died."

Carafano also points out that the media's stereotype of victims as poor and
black is wrong. The demographics of the dead mostly mirror those of the
city, but for one exception: Most who died were elderly. Stats at the
Louisiana Department of Public Health show that people 60 and older make up
about 15 percent of the city's residents but 74 percent of the known
victims. Blacks, according to a lengthy report from Knight-Ridder in
December, were slightly under-represented among the dead. The mortalities of
Katrina, in other words, were less about race and class and more akin to the
official neglect of the most vulnerable during heat waves that killed more
than 1,000 elderly in the Midwest in 1995 and nearly 15,000 in France in
2003. Hospitals and nursing homes were particularly hard hit.

The truth about the National Guard's role in Hurricane Katrina is gradually
emerging. John Hill, senior Louisiana government reporter for Gannett, put
together a huge take on the Louisiana Guard operation in the current issue
of Louisiana Life. "While those stories of violence whipped across the
nation from a press corps isolated on high ground on Canal Street near the
river, the National Guard and state responders set about doing their work,"
Hill wrote.

Still, the existence of a functioning command center at the Superdome raises
almost as many questions as it answers. Mayor Ray Nagin, source of many of
the unfounded rumors of widespread civil disorder, was staying at a hotel
near the Dome. Why didn't he or his police chief, Eddie Compass, move their
command center there, where they could tap into the Guard's awareness of the
situation in the city? Why didn't they run aid requests through EMACs? Like
Compass' three-day disappearance, this is a genuine mystery. 

Governor Kathleen Blanco, meanwhile, had a direct pipeline to the command
center and clearly knew what was going on, which might explain why she
maintained her authority over the Guard and resisted calls from the
President to federalize it. It also explains her apparent callousness to
those stuck in the Dome - she knew the real situation was not as bad as the
media was reporting. At the very least, she deserves credit for standing up
to the national media and following the advice of the junior officers on the
scene.

Hill's story also indicates how the politics of Katrina rescues are playing
out in Louisiana: Gov. Blanco, facing the voters in 2008, is eagerly, and
with justification, claiming some of the credit for the rescue operation.
"When all the stories are told," Gov. Blanco is quoted as saying, "the story
is going to be that Louisianans were saved by Louisianans." Understandable,
but a little bit of a stretch, as it conveniently leaves out the federal
contribution, namely the Coast Guard, the regular armed forces and Guard
units from other states, as well as the key coordinating role the National
Guard Bureau played.

What's more puzzling is why the White House hasn't joined Blanco in trying
to rehabilitate its reputation. The handling of Katrina by FEMA is one of
the most-cited reasons for the President's low poll numbers. The national
Democratic Party, meanwhile, continues to try to hang Katrina around the
President's neck. As Adam Nagourney recently wrote in the New York Times,
"Democrats are looking to this city as the symbol of an administration that
is at once incompetent and heartless."

The president's side isn't a complicated story. He sits atop a huge
bureaucratic machine. He's responsible for how the pieces of the pyramid
work, not every last detail. "The rescues happened way below the radar
screen and that's not bad," Carafano said. "You want this kind of
decentralized execution. If we have to sit around for someone in Washington
to make a decision, we're all going to die." 

FEMA failed miserably. Yet the Coast Guard, a branch of the much-maligned
Department of Homeland Security, operated precisely according to plan and
saved up to 30,000 lives amid near total destruction. The National Guard
Bureau helped run the show. The State Guard and regular military, which owes
its extraordinary professionalism to the administration's insistence on
training and equipage for service in Iraq, saved tens of thousands more.

That's the real story of Katrina. But the national media isn't about to
acknowledge it unless the administration makes its own case, something that,
so far at least, it hasn't begun to do.

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