Jay Reding.com

The WSJ has a piece on how misinformation hampered the federal response to Hurricane Katrina:

For the Federal Emergency Management Agency, rumors of lawlessness simply delayed on-the-ground relief efforts and turned even routine errands into a cumbersome exercise. One official, who was posted at the Superdome, said federal rescuers and doctors were required to secure armed escorts even for short trips across the street.

To be sure, the situation in New Orleans did appear dire at times and looting was common, gunshots rang out in the city and bands of dazed survivors did spill out in the streets looking for food and shelter. A handful of people died at the Convention Center and the Superdome and at least one or two of those deaths appear to have been murders.

But some of the most spectacular looting — the sacking of the Wal-Mart in the lower Garden District and the summary emptying of the Office Depot Uptown, appear to have been initiated not by organized bands of thieves but police and City Hall bureaucrats intent on securing supplies.

Moreover, while confusion reigned in many areas of the city, some places were more tranquil. New Orleans Coroner Frank Minyard, whose forensic team has conducted scores of autopsies on the 650 or so bodies recovered from New Orleans says he has run across only seven gunshot victims. “Seven gunshots isn’t even a good Saturday night in New Orleans,” Dr. Minyard says.

The media’s hysterical overreaction to events in New Orleans severely hampered rescue efforts and sent rescue personnel off to deal with nonexistent threats. The local officials in New Orleans were utterly incompetent, and the city’s utterly dysfunctional bureaucracy ensured that what disaster plans that existed weren’t followed.

President Bush’s idea of further federalizing disaster response is a mistake. Federal authorities can provide valuable resources, but they are not first responders. First responders need to know the area, they need to know the threats, they need to know what resources they have, and they need to know the people in charge. The 82nd Airborne can’t just swoop in and expect to know what resources to put where. That’s not their job. That is the job of local authorities, and unlike New Orleans, most local authorities are better equipped to deal with disaster situations. That’s what they’re trained and equipped to do.

A one-size fits all approach won’t work. In fact, it will make things worse. The response of FEMA to the disaster in New Orleans wasn’t adequate, but given the incredible challenges faced, it was hardly a signal that our entire disaster preparedness system was broken.

The Right Way And The Wrong Way

Further federalizing disaster response is a grave mistake. A Washington-based bureaucracy can’t respond with the agility of local government, nor do they have the relevant knowledge and specialization. Further federalizing disaster response will only encourage the kind of sloppy preparedness that led to the problems in New Orleans.

For instance, Florida’s hurricane response protocols should be a national model. Begun under former Gov. Lawton Chiles and continued under Gov. Bush, Florida’s emergency management system is second-to-none in dealing with the frequent threat of hurricanes. The state provides detailed training to local officials, takes immediate control of media resources to get accurate information to the people, and encourages a culture of responsiveness at all levels of government. In last year’s spate of hurricanes, Florida’s disaster response protocols worked flawlessly to minimize the damage and help the state recover from the second the storm ended.

Plans like those utilized in Florida for hurricanes and New York City for terrorism and other disasters should be used as models for municipal disaster planning. The elements of a successful disaster plan are fairly basic:

• Training: Cities need to actively train first responders to deal with disasters. In 1989, the Sioux City, Iowa had recently undertaken an extensive training effort to get local officials prepared in the event of an air disaster. When United Airlines Flight 232 had a major flight emergency and crashed at the local airport, local officials did a brilliant job of coordinating a rapid response that saved many lives. They had a triage system in place. They had ambulance pre-positioned. Proper training at all levels of government is crucial to a disaster response - and local governments must assume that federal help will not come within the crucial first 48 hours of a disaster, especially a wide scale disaster like a hurricane..
• Coordination: Municipal, county, and state officials need to have a clearly-defined chain of command, clearly defined roles, and must be able to work seamlessly together. Each agency of local government needs to know precisely what they need to do what who they need to coordinate with to achieve that objective. A disaster is no time for turf struggles or mixed messages.
• Public Information: Local governments need to have precise and exact instructions for what to do in case of a disaster. Those messages need to be simple, and they need to send people to places where there has been adequate pre-planning. The idiotic decision to send New Orleans residents to “shelters” where there had been no prior planning for taking in evacuees was a major mistake. The media confusion over what to do led to further problems. If the disaster plan says that buses will run 48 hours before a hurricane to evacuate residents, then those buses need to be there 48 hours before exactly where the plan says they’re to be. Hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities need to have concrete disaster plans, and each employee should be trained in executing those plans. The public needs accurate information about what to do, or chaos will result. Local government must not make promises and then not fulfill them.

The wrong way is to assume that the federal calvary will ride in to the rescue and make everything go away. It’s not their jobs, and even the most efficient federal response can’t by nature be a first-response role. President Bush needs to make it very clear that local authorities who do not engage in proper disaster response training run the risk of losing federal funds until they do. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security should work together in having local officials who have demonstrated knowledge in disaster response train other local officials to do the same.

In a disaster, preparedness is key. New Orleans was not prepared for disaster, and the mistakes they made cost lives and made the already difficult task of dealing with a hurricane and major flooding even more difficult. However, learning the wrong set of lessons from these mistakes would only compound them. Federalizing disaster response is a massive cop-out. The military is stretched thin enough as it is without the strain of being a disaster response team - and the legal issues of a larger military role are troubling at best. Local governments need to understand that they bear the burden of first response, and the only way to prevent the chaos we saw in New Orleans is for them to do their jobs.

Howard Fineman has an interesting piece in Newsweek asking why the Democratic Party can’t seem to capitalize in the GOP’s current weakness. There’s no doubt that this is turning into an annus horribilis for the GOP. January’s promise has long faded into a series of horrendous political stumbles. Bush’s approval numbers are in the toilet, the Republican base is not happy, and DeLay’s legal troubles only make things worse.

A competent party - say the GOP of 1993 - would be salivating right now. Yet Fineman notes that the Democrats aren’t too happy:

With George W. Bush’s presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, you’d think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They can’t stand Bush, but didn’t have much faith in their own party’s prospects.

I think Fineman hits on something here. What does the Democratic Party stand for? For the past 5 years it’s been “We hate George W. Bush.” That isn’t enough. It wasn’t enough in 2000. It wasn’t enough in 2002. It wasn’t enough in 2004. It won’t be enough in 2006. In 2008, the issue becomes entirely moot. George W. Bush’s political career ends in January 2009, and basing your entire party on the hatred of one man and his party doesn’t win elections.

If anything, this crisis of leadership is probably good for the Republican Party. The GOP has grown too complacent by far. The fatcat Washington culture has taken over from the Contract for America outsider culture that brought the GOP to power. Bush’s compassionate conservatism means pushing for a responsible fiscal policy but a manifestly irresponsible spending policy. Bush has not shrunk government, he’s grown it faster than ever.

Bush just appears tired - it’s hard to blame him for that, after 5 years of incalculable hatred and vitriol every single day. But the President doesn’t have that luxury. A captain can’t spend time in his cabin when there’s a storm battering the ship - he needs to take the wheel and do his job. Bush needs to be pushing a conservative agenda - demanding fiscal restraint, finding a conservative jurist to replace Justice O’Connor, reforming Social Security, and leading on this war. In other words, the Republican Party needs to stand for something.

The GOP can’t count on Democratic disarray forever. If the Democrats start ditching the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore/MoveOn/Daily Kos radical wing of the party and put together some reasonable, articulate, and fiscally responsible candidates the GOP will be in deep trouble in 2006. It’s heartening to see that some Republican lawmakers are getting the idea, but that’s only a start. We’ve lost our way when it comes to how we view government. If we’re the party for Slightly Less Bigger Government instead of the party of Small Government, then a lot of fiscal conservatives - a group that is vastly larger than social conservatives - will start leaving our corner. The division of the GOP isn’t a great as the division between the antiwar radicals and the moderates on the other side of the aisle, but it isn’t something that can be swept away either.

Does that mean that the GOP should surrender to despair like their Democratic colleagues? Absolutely not. Fineman’s right - we have a host of very promising candidates for 2008, and some strong ones for 2006. McCain, Guiliani, and Rice could all wipe the floor with any candidate the Democrats throw at them - and while the old argument says that they’d never survive a primary, don’t be so sure. If Guiliani decides to run, he’s got the job, based simply on his leadership abilities, and especially if he’s willing to draw a compromise on abortion such as supporting parental notification and restricting federal funding of abortion providers. McCain is pro-life, one of the staunchest fiscal conservatives in the Senate, has indicated that he’ll hold the line of taxes, and has been one of the strongest advocates for this war we have. His positions on campaign finance reform are reprehensible, but then again, President Bush is the one whose signature is on the BCRA.

It all comes back to the fundamental truths of politics - the two things that matter are candidates and ideas. Everything else is a sideshow. If the Republicans can start advancing a pro-growth, anti-pork platform for 2006, they stand a reasonable chance of holding onto power or even taking a few vulnerable seats from the Democrats like North Dakota and Minnesota. If not, 2006 is going to get hairy.

Bill Clinton won in 1993 because he advocated a fiscally responsible platform that eschewed the hard left and faced a Republican base that was deeply divided over fiscal issues. The Republicans have a chance now to ensure that history does not repeat itself by embracing the core values of smaller government, fiscal restraint, and national security. It’s time to get this party back on track, because counting on a weakened Democratic Party may end up paying off, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

Fouad Ajami has a very lengthy but astute look at how events in Iraq are changing the Arab world. Arab Shi’ites and Kurds have long been oppressed minorities across the Arab world, and the idea that Iraq would give Shi’ites and Kurds not only a voice at the table, but a chance to shape policy has the old guard within the Sunni Arab majority worried that the crumbling foundations that have kept the autocratic Arab governments together will finally collapse:

The drumbeats against Iraq that originate from the League of Arab States and its Egyptian apparatchiks betray the panic of an old Arab political class afraid that there is something new unfolding in Iraq–a different understanding of political power and citizenship, a possible break with the culture of tyranny and the cult of Big Men disposing of the affairs–and the treasure–of nations. It is pitiable that an Egyptian political class that has abdicated its own dream of modernity and bent to the will of a pharaonic regime is obsessed with the doings in Iraq. But this is the political space left open by the master of the realm. To be sure, there is terror in the streets of Iraq; there is plenty there for the custodians of a stagnant regime in Cairo to point to as a cautionary tale of what awaits societies that break with “secure” ways. But the Egyptian autocracy knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with a modern social contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt stands for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians in recent years. We must not fall for Cairo’s claims of primacy in Arab politics; these are hollow, and Iraq will further expose the rot that has settled upon the political life of Egypt.

The fact is that these worries only confirm that the removal of Saddam was the right thing to do. The old thinking of the realpolitik era was that our foreign policy should, above all, assume that stability was in our national interest. It didn’t matter if a country was ruled by a tyrant, so long as he was our tyrant. While that sort of thinking helped hedge against Soviet domination, it no longer applies in today’s world of global Islamic terrorism.

As Ralph Peters once wrote, stability is America’s enemy. The completely dysfunctional system of Arab autocratic rule that is pervasive in the Middle East can no longer be allowed to continue. When Secretary of State Rice finally called for truly democratic elections in Egypt it was an indication that the Bush Administration is finally getting the big picture. Mubarak may be an autocrat, if a benign one, but the prevailing thinking was that he was a firewall against the radicals. However, Egypt has become a hotbed of terrorism and Islamic radicalism precisely because it’s undemocratic system of government means that the polity has no real method of democratic change. While Mubarak got away with yet another rubber-stamp election with a veneer of democracy over the top, the fact that brave men like Ayman Nour are free today is a testament to the burgeoning pro-democracy movement spreading across the Middle East.

The autocracy of the Arab world feeds into radicalism by making terrorism one of the only ways of effecting any sort of political change. People have an innate need to be in connection with their government, and when people are unhappy in a democracy, they can vote the bums out. In a dictatorship, their only choice is to put the bums against the wall and shoot them - provided that the army doesn’t kill them first. That sort of political impotence feeds into the people’s rage against a life that they can barely control - and Arab governments have been very good at funneling that rage away from themselves and towards Israel and America.

However, the problems of the Arab world have nothing to do with Israel or America. The Palestinians are little more than pawns. If tomorrow a miraculous peace broke out between Israel and Palestine, the Middle East would still be utterly dysfunctional. If Israel disappeared, the Middle East would be dysfunctional. The Arab world needs to look inwards to see the problems at home that is keeping it mired in societal mediocrity. The people of Iraq have an unprecedented chance to do that, and they are embracing an ideology of democratization and individual liberty that provides the greatest existential threat to the old autocratic order that they have ever faced. They know quite well that if the Iraqi people demand democracy, it won’t be long before their people do as well. And the governments of Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are beginning to feel it already.

The situation in Iraq is so unsettled largely because it represents a titanic change in the Middle East, and the old order has every interest in maintaining the autocracy that kept them on top. However, that’s a feature, not a bug. Our desire to smash the old orders in the Middle East are based in self interest as they are in the noble support of democracy. Groups like al-Qaeda don’t feed off the truly poor and oppressed - terrorism is a sport of the middle class. Mohammad Atta was the son of a Cairo doctor who joined with fellow engineering students in Hamburg to form a cell of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden himself was a multi-millionaire before becoming an Islamic radical. It is the middle class who most strongly feel the effects of living in a polity that gives them little control over their future.

The key to breaking that cycle is ending that autocracy. As Ajami finds, the worries of the old guards in the Arab League and elsewhere indicate that is precisely what is happening. Despite the violence of the Zarqawis and the bin Ladens, the events in Iraq will not be stopped through bloodshed. The process of democracy will continue in that nation, so long as the coalition and the Iraqi people continue to remain resolute - and thankfully that is most assuredly the case.

There is a massive change brewing in the Middle East, causing fear among many who have every interest in seeing the region autocratic and intolerant - as well as those in the West who wish to see America fail and be humbled. However, like many waves of democratization throughout history there will be setbacks and trials, but only one end.

The Washington Post has a devastating article about the Louisiana congressional delegation’s demand for a $250 billion federal handout:

The nation is at war. It is mired in debt. It has been hit by floods and hurricanes. In the face of this adversity, congressional leaders have rightly dropped proposals for yet more tax cuts, and some have suggested removing the pork from the recently passed transportation bill. But this spirit of forbearance has not touched the Louisiana congressional delegation. The state’s representatives have come up with a request for $250 billion in federal reconstruction funds for Louisiana alone — more than $50,000 per person in the state. This money would come on top of payouts from businesses, national charities and insurers. And it would come on top of the $62.3 billion that Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief.

Like looters who seize six televisions when their homes have room for only two, the Louisiana legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could possibly spend usefully.

Louisiana is one of the worst-governed states in the Union, possessing a government that is thoroughly corrupt and inefficient - and now they want a quarter of a trillion dollars in political patronage. Such a request is absolutely outrageous and a demonstration of how entrenched the pork-barrel entitlement culture is in that state. The Post continues:

The Louisiana delegation has apparently devoted little thought to the root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. New Orleans was flooded not because the Army Corps of Engineers had insufficient money to build flood protections, but because its money was allocated by a system of political patronage. The smart response would be to insist that, in the future, no Corps money be wasted on unworthy projects, but the Louisiana bill instead creates a mechanism by which cost-benefit analysis can be avoided.

The emphasis is, of course, mine. Interesting that the Post would explode one of the larger lefty talking points after Katrina. Then again, that statement is entirely true - the money to build the levees was there, it was just wasted through corruption and unnecessary and often counterproductive pork-barrel projects. The levee system would hold back a Category 3 storm - when Katrina hit New Orleans it was a Cat 4.

The Post is exactly right: Congress should rightly ignore the Louisiana delegation’s demands and do what works. Which means putting the levee system under federal control, putting tight controls on money sent to the state, and locking the corrupt local politicos out of the process. Furthermore, the level of corruption in Louisiana demands a RICO probe to determine how much federal money was absconded with and where it went.

The Louisiana delegation, especially Senator Vitter and Rep. Jindal - both of whom should know better - should be ashamed of itself. This kind of pork-barrelling not only trivializes a major catastrophe, but shows the nation that Louisiana is more serious about spending billion in taxpayer money than seriously preventing another disaster.

Power Line finds that the reports of anarchy in New Orleans were horrendously overblown, and that the media’s sensationalism diverted badly-needed resources to deal with non-existent crises.

It appears that the media is fundamentally broken. The misreporting of events during the Katrina aftermath aren’t an isolated incident. The trust network that the media used to have with the American people is breaking down, and for good reason. The media is supposed to be neutral, objective, and competent. Yet it would appear that it meets neither of those criteria. Instead, we’re subjected to a bunch of blow-dried blowhards commenting on absolutely nothing and contributing even less. At least when the media is fixated on the latest Blonde-Girl-Goes-Missing story du jour the impact of their inability to get the facts straight is minimized. When it’s matters of life or death like public policy, war, or natural disasters, the media is actively making things worse.

One of the problems is the rise of the professional journalistic class. Journalists who comment on military matters almost never have served in the military. They don’t understand military strategy. The vast majority of reporters covering Iraq never leave the Green Zone and rely on stringers - who often have ties to the terrorists themselves - to do the original reporting. The story that we get very rarely reflects the reality of life on the ground - which is why there’s such a fundamental disconnect between the people fighting in Iraq and the American population at large. You have a case of journalistic groupthink at its finest - the opinion that Iraq is a quagmire was established a long time ago, and the reporting from Iraq is designed to bolster that view. You could say that the evidence is being “fixed” around the policy.

The “embedding” of reporters into combat units helped by ensuring that journalists got the story from the ground first-hand, but sadly that program has largely been cast aside.

It’s this blend of inexperience and bias that is driving the mainstream media right into the ground. Exacerbating the situation is the institutional arrogance of the media. Since Watergate (and even before), the media cemented the idea that they were the “Fifth Estate” - they represented an unelected branch of government whose job - nay, duty - was to provide a check on political power. The problem with that attitude is that when you see yourself in that light, everyone wants to become the next Woodward and Bernstein - no matter what. When the media smells blood, it’s like a feeding frenzy of sharks, even though there may be nothing to the story. For liberals, think Whitewater. For conservatives, think the faked ANG memos.

The media is experiencing the inevitable result of their own institutional arrogance in the form of plummeting readership and ratings. The New York Times recently went through a round of layoffs. The Los Angeles Times is experiencing a similar fall in circulation. Ratings for the Big Three networks are down.

The trust networks that made anchors like Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings such monumental figures are being eroded by years of sloppy and biased journalism. Fox News exploited a major ideological hole in the media - everyone was too busy catering the liberal viewers that conservative viewers had nowhere to go - and Fox quickly realized that by portraying themselves as more “fair and balanced’ than the other networks they could steal back the viewers turned off by the biases perceived in the other networks. And indeed, that strategy worked. Fox is hardly a paragon of journalistic excellence, but it does have some of the finest political coverage, in large part due to old-fashioned journalists like Brit Hume.

And therein lies the secret to the media’s future: getting back to the basics. The media’s problem is that they’re less concerned with the hold fashioned idea of reporting Who, What, Why, Where, When, and How and more with trying to “speak truth to power” and jockeying to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. Instead, the media needs to adopt the philosophies of Sgt. Friday - “Just the facts, ma’am.” The fact is that most journalists are increasingly lazy and vapid, but emboldened by a sense of noblesse oblige that blinds them to the reality of life outside their own little world. If you want to “change the world”, you should be in the Peace Corps, not the press. The job of the press isn’t to change the world, it’s to tell us what’s going on and let us all form our own conclusions.

Sadly, budgets for reporting are getting slashed, editorial standards are declining, and the marketplace is fundamentally changing. Not to beat on that particular dead horse, but the reporting in the blogosphere is every bit as good as that in the mainstream media - provided you know where to look. For instance, Michael Yon’s reports from Mosul with the “Deuce Four” are some of the best examples of modern war reporting we have. Yon’s work is incredibly gripping - easily Pulitzer Prize material, and offers a perspective rarely seen in the rest of the media. That is the future of journalism.

And while bloggers are certainly not unbiased, their biases aren’t masked by a veneer of objectivity maintained in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. CBS’ faked Bush documents fiasco didn’t survive more than a few hours in the blogosphere. When the mainstream media has Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Dan Rather, and other reporters who routinely and strongly inject their biases into what should be straightforward reporting, it’s hard to argue that the signal-to-noise ratio of the mainstream media is all that much better than blogs.

The media is failing us in Iraq. They failed us after Katrina. They will continue to get things wrong, because the focus of media is no longer on presenting the facts, but buttressing a particular worldview. The very attitude of modern journalism is at fault here, and so long as that attitude remains prevalent, the continuing decline of the profession will continue unabated.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has much more on the problems with today’s media:

Just give us the facts, I say. Give us the context. Those who control the narrative control the power. And the thought of Shepard Smith or Geraldo Rivera or Dan Rather driving public policy on a regular basis is simply to horrible to consider.

Indeed.