Turn on the TV, and there’s so much bullshit going on about New Orleans it makes me want to vomit.

I don’t want to try to “debunk” any of it because doing that only adds to the noise. Some of what they’re saying is true, and some of what they’re saying is false. The problem is, these people are just angry talking heads who have no regard for the truth. They just want people to blame, and everyone picks their own demons: Bush, global warming, racism, class warfare, New Orleans government, Iraq, etc.

Let’s take time to frame the situation rationally. I’m not going to talk about what’s going on now, or what we should do now. There are too many people doing that. Let’s try to think rationally about what went wrong. The problem was we didn’t react quick enough.

Why? I can only take this apart piece by piece before putting it together.

Obviously, one of the factors is money. Money that should’ve went to FEMA went elsewhere.

Another factor is the magnitude of the disaster. Sure, we had hurricanes in Florida. However, we have an entire city under water. The infrastructure is completely destroyed.

Lack of foresight is important. There should’ve been some type of plan to deal with this before it happened. Plan A, plan B. Plan A is fix the levees before the hurricane happens. Plan B should be plan for evacuation and relief, not whine about how Plan A isn’t happening. Obviously, there wasn’t some type of plan created before hand, lest this scale of disaster would not have occured.

Now, there are different levels of planning required. There are city responsibilities, and federal responsibilities. Neither of these got done. Federal responsibilities I addressed earlier: Money for FEMA went elsewhere. But there is something else I need to address: The Department of Homeland Security. It seems to me that the current organization of the department of homeland security has made us less secure. More bureaucracy means things happen more slowly. We need to separate the jobs of dealing with natural disasters and dealing with terrorist attacks. The old FEMA director had a spot on the cabinet. Would things have happened differently if we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security? It’s hard to say, but I think the answer is yes. A man with a direct line to the president can interrupt him during his vacation and say things need to be done.

Well, that’s all I have for tonight. More piece by piece tomorrow. I’ll be putting it all together when I’m done picking it apart.