I just listened to Joseph Contraras being interviewed on MSNBC and he slammed Bush. It was amazing. He contributed to an article in Newsweek titled "Lost City" and MSNBC was interviewing him.
He said that Bush dropped the ball, staying at his ranch for two days...like he flew around the skies for so many hours after 9/11. He said Bush is not capable of leading in a crisis. It was an awesome interview.
I went to Newsweek and I've copied parts of the article below.
Day after day of images showed exhausted families and their crying children stepping around corpses while they begged: Where is the water? Where are the buses? They seemed helpless, powerless, at the mercy of forces far beyond their control. The lack of rapid response left people in the United States, and all over the world, wondering how an American city could look like Mogadishu or Port-au-Prince. The refugee crisis--a million people without homes, jobs, schools--hardly fit George W. Bush's vision of the American Colossus.
What went wrong? Just about everything. How the system failed is a tangled story, but the basic narrative is becoming clearer: hesitancy, bureaucratic rivalries, failures of leadership from city hall to the White House and epically bad luck combined to create a morass. In the early aftermath, fingers pointed in all directions. The president was to blame; no, the looters. No, the bureaucrats. No, the local politicians. It was FEMA's fault--unless it was the Department of Homeland Security's. Or the Pentagon's. Certainly the government failed, and the catastrophe exposed, for all the world to see, raw racial divisions.
Bush's many critics will say that the president was disengaged, on vacation, distracted by Iraq and insensitive to the needs of poor black people. The White House blames the magnitude of the storm itself, patchy information on the ground and a confused chain of command, according to a senior Bush aide who requests anonymity in order to speak freely about internal administration discussions. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Bush is fighting a war, and he is sometimes slow to react, and he may have been lulled by early reports that New Orleans had been spared the worst of the storm. These are all legitimate excuses. Still, we expect more from a president.
A poll taken for the "Hurricane Pam" planning exercise in 2004 predicted that, if ordered to evacuate New Orleans, about 30 percent of the city of a half-million people would stay behind. So it should have come as no surprise that some 80,000 to 100,000 people chose not to heed the order of Mayor Nagin to get out of town on the Saturday before the storm. A few stayed behind by choice.
Brooke Duncan, who was "Rex, King of Carnival," at the 1971 Mardi Gras, wanted to remain in the city his family had first come to before the Civil War. But when the water began to lap at his house in the French Quarter, Duncan, 81, set out carrying his pet dog, a corgi, and a gun to a friend's house. He joined a convoy of well-off Garden District residents driving out of the city. "We had weapons and displayed them through the window," said Duncan, who is now in Cincinnati.
About a fifth of New Orleans residents live below the poverty line, and one in five does not have a car. This disadvantaged population is overwhelmingly African-American. The South has a sordid history when it comes to poor blacks and hurricanes.
Washington, too, was slow to react to the crisis. The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was reluctant for the military to take a lead role in disaster relief, a job traditionally performed by FEMA and by the National Guard, which is commanded by state governors. President Bush could have "federalized" the National Guard in an instant. That's what his father, President George H.W. Bush, did after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Back then, the Justice Department sent Robert Mueller, a jut-jawed ex-Marine (who is now FBI director), to take charge, showing, in effect, that the cavalry had arrived. FEMA's current head, Michael Brown, has appeared over his head and even a little clueless in news interviews. He is far from the sort of take-charge presence New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani conveyed after 9/11.
Up to now, the Bush administration has not hesitated to sweep aside the opinions of lawyers on such matters as prisoners' rights. But after Katrina, a strange paralysis set in. For days, Bush's top advisers argued over legal niceties about who was in charge, according to three White House officials who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. Beginning early in the week, Justice Department lawyers presented arguments for federalizing the Guard, but Defense Department lawyers fretted about untrained 19-year-olds trying to enforce local laws, according to a senior law-enforcement official who requested anonymity citing the delicate nature of the discussions.
While Washington debated, the situation in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast deteriorated. Bush traveled to the region in part to work out a deal with local officials to establish a clearer chain of command. By the weekend, federal officials said there could be tens of thousands of troops in New Orleans in short order. Saturday, Bush pledged to return to the region on Monday--and to deploy 7,000 additional active-duty troops under the Pentagon's control. But for many, the help was arriving too late. Officials worked through the weekend trying to hammer out the jurisdictional issues.