When the Levees Broke

Tonight on HBO, the celebration of the anniversary that Bush-haters have been waiting for officially begins.

The hoopla kicks off with Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

From The New York Times:

It isn’t the painful recapitulation of the incompetence, indifference and confusion in high places that makes Spike Lee’s epic documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” a wrenching experience. What breaks your heart is the film’s accumulated firsthand stories of New Orleans residents who lost everything in the flood after Hurricane Katrina, and the dismaying conclusion that a year after the disaster, the broken city has been largely abandoned to fend for itself.

A powerful chorus of witnesses and talking heads that cuts across racial and class lines was assembled for the four-hour film, to be shown tonight and tomorrow on HBO in two-hour blocks. Although seeds of hope are woven into this tapestry of rage, sorrow and disbelief, the inability of government at almost every level to act quickly and decisively leaves you aghast at what amounts to a collective failure of will.

...“When the Levees Broke” has clear-cut heroes and villains. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin comes across as a salty, tough-talking leader bravely persevering in the face of social breakdown. Harry Belafonte and the Rev. Al Sharpton are treated as sages, and Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, belatedly dispatched to begin the major evacuation, is hailed by Mayor Nagin as “a John Wayne dude.” The villains are the usual ones from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.

The film has no major new revelations about the outrageously tardy response of the Bush administration to the crisis, as if any were needed. The failures speak for themselves.

All-righty, then.

To coincide with Lee's telling of the national nightmare of Hurricane Katrina and the other retrospectives that are coming down the pike, I will be republishing some posts from my archives.

First, let's review the reactions of some prominent figures, from the "Hurricane Katrina Wall of Shame Gallery."

Let's recall how some shamelessly politicized the disaster. Recall how some made comments that revealed their own personal inadequacies. Recall how some said things that were just nuts.

From one year ago--

"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach. It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."

--LOUIS FARRAKHAN


"It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.”

--RANDALL ROBINSON


"They wanted to take over my National Guard. A governor has to have the final say on what's going to happen."

--KATHLEEN BLANCO


"Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country."

--RAY NAGIN


"The slow pace of relief efforts in the face of a mounting death toll, coupled with the need to handle what is sure to be an unprecedented long-term feeding, housing and medical care challenge, seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed."

--HILLARY CLINTON


"If one person criticizes [our sheriffs], or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me - one more word about it after this show airs and I - I might likely have to punch him - literally."

--MARY LANDRIEU


"Operational effectiveness is an 'F' or a grade lower, if there is such a grade."

--DAVID VITTER


"Since [Katrina hit] Americans have seen another kind of disaster unfold. The irresponsible lack of attention by our federal government has led directly to the devastation of communities and the loss of American lives.”

--HOWARD DEAN


"How much time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation? Did the fact that he was outside of Washington, D.C., have any effect on the federal government's response?"

--HARRY REID


"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence...I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich."

--CHARLES RANGEL


"The people of the Gulf region were struck by two disasters. First was the hurricane and then the failure of the federal government in time of great need. The buck stops at the president's desk. The president said he's going to lead the investigation into what went wrong. He needs to look only in the mirror."

--NANCY PELOSI


"If the press could get in and out of there, could bring in their TV trucks and everything else, why the hell couldn't a truckload of water, a truckload of medicine, a busload of physicians, people who could bring help and care and hope to the people - why couldn't they get through?"

--PATRICK LEAHY


"I feel race was a factor. Why? I remember almost a year ago to the day I was in Florida when a hurricane was coming not a point four, not a point five, and I saw the white house move. I saw the government of the president's brother move. National guard was already alerted before the storm ever hit. It seems to me that if we can be alert in Palm Beach, Florida, we could have been alert in New Orleans."

--AL SHARPTON


"Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now...We need strong leadership at the top of America right now in order to accomplish this."

--AARON BROUSSARD


"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response."

--JESSE JACKSON


"We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died in this great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color."

--ELIJAH CUMMINGS


"Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

--ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.


"We are an embarrassment to the world."

--MITT ROMNEY


"This man called President Bush has a lot to answer for. I don't know if this man is really taking care of America. This government has been shameful."

--PIERCE BROSNAN


"George Bush doesn't care about black people."

--KANYE WEST


"Kanye West said during a concert on NBC that George Bush doesn't care about black people, which I don't believe. What I do believe is that neither he nor anyone else cares enough about them."

--DON IMUS


"There's people still there waiting to be rescued. To me that is not acceptable. I know they have reasons for it. But I don't want to hear those reasons....How can it be so easy to send planes in another country to kill everybody in a second and destroy lives. We need to serve our country."

--CELINE DION


"There are people that are dying right now and I mean babies and old people and everybody in between - they're dying. There are people dying and (the US government are) not putting the boats in the water, I think that's criminal negligence. I don't think anybody ever anticipated the criminal negligence of the Bush administration in this situation."

--SEAN PENN


"8,000 Guardsmen from Mississippi and Louisiana who might have helped, might have been deployed in the relief efforts are, in fact, in Iraq and not in Mississippi and Louisiana."

--KEITH OLBERMANN