Right Wing Nut House

Politicians are not very bright. If they were, they wouldn’t keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Take Mayor Bloomberg of New York city. Here’s a man who they were talking about as a potential president just a couple of weeks ago. Now, if he ran for dog catcher, he might eke out a victory.

The reason? Let’s call it “The Bilandic Effect,” named after Mayor Michael Bilandic of Chicago who botched snow removal after a devastating series of snow storms in the winter of 1979. The result was that little known Jane Byrne, former head of the consumer affairs office, swept to victory in the Democratic primary, delivering a humiliating defeat to Bilandic.

Apparently, those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it:

A testy Mayor Bloomberg fended off criticism of the city’s failure to clear hundreds of snow-choked streets Tuesday as an avalanche of critics attacked his reputation as a supermanager.

“This mayor prides himself on saying the buck stops with him, and it should. We hold him responsible for what we’re calling theBloomberg Blizzard,” said CityCouncilman David Greenfield (D-Brooklyn).

“The whole world is laughing that the greatest city in the world cannot manage to clear the streets. New York today looks like a Third World country.”

Greenfield, normally a backer of the mayor, said every side street - and some larger avenues - in Borough Park were waiting for a plow 30 hours after the storm’s end.

Similar and worse complaints were heard from much of the snow-buried city outside Manhattan.

A Queens woman’s death Monday was blamed on the backlog of911 calls and on snow-clogged streets that delayed first responders from reaching her Corona home, said state Sen. Jose Peralta (D-Queens).

“Like many New Yorkers, I woke up two days straight to an unplowed street outside my frontdoor,” said city Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “This is not business as usual, and frustration is mounting.”

Bilandic’s - and Bloomberg’s - problem is simple; both cities purchased snow removal equipment for the average or slightly above average snowfall one would get in their respective cities. Unfortunately, when that once in a century blizzard hits, man and machine are inadequate to handle the situation.

Byrne solved that problem - much to the gratitude of every mayor in Chicago since - by purchasing enough snow removal equipment to dig the city out of more snow than could choke the Abominable Snowman. There’s hardly been a peep of criticism directed toward the Chicago mayor since - at least not enough to cost him his job.

And Bloomberg? Aside from the fact that he needed to be brought down a peg or two, he will probably weather this storm. But I doubt whether we will hear much talk from now on about his candidacy for the presidency.

This post originally appears on The American Thinker

Due to some internet connectivity issues (the fault of Comcast), I am not going to post anything original today.

I would like some comments on whether or not you think we should close the Guantanamo Detention Center in light of both the UN report and the recent National Journal cover story on who is really being held there.

Probably Monday, I’ll let everyone know what I think - if you haven’t guessed already.

Meanwhile, enjoy some oldies but goodies from the archives:

Al Gore in Sweden

Your own Personal Disaster Relief Associate

What does a snowstorm in Chicago have to do with Katrina?

“Race, Class, and Baloney in the Big Easy”

Star Trek’s “Scotty’s” death on the anniversary of the moon landing

The fallout from the political assault on the Bush Administration by the MSM and the left following Hurricane Katrina is spreading to Asia as politicians and press organs in Pakistan seek to make President Musharraf pay the same political price paid by President Bush for the perceived sin of “not caring” about the victims of a natural disaster.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said his government was doing its best to respond to the crisis. He had appealed for international help, particularly cargo helicopters to reach remote areas cut off by landslides.

“We are doing whatever is humanly possible,” Musharraf said. “There should not be any blame game. We are trying to reach all those areas where people need our help.”

Anyone who doesn’t think ordinary people - not to mention governments - from around the world don”t watch CNN International or other warmed-over western news reports should listen to this poor fellow who was forced into looting just to survive:

“We haven’t eaten anything for two or three days. The shops are closed and we haven’t got anything from the government,” said a 20-year-old man who refused to identify himself as he ferreted away stolen goods. “We are desperate and hungry.”

Sound familiar?

And here is what happens when aid is distributed the way that critics of the Administration’s Katrina efforts at the Superdome and Convention Center in New Orleans thought was necessary:

In the first major influx of aid, about 10 trucks brought by Pakistani charities and volunteers rumbled into Muzaffarabad early Tuesday. Attempts by relief workers for an orderly distribution dissolved into chaos, as residents scuffled for cooking oil, sugar, rice, blankets and tents.

The same thing happened with every truck, every helicopter that was ferrying aid to these devastated locations. It is why international aid organizations refuse to deliver assistance to areas where there is no local security; people die in these life and death fights for food.

More similar complaints voiced by ordinary people in Pakistan with those expressed by American journalists in New Orleans:

“If the government has devoted its efforts to rescue a few hundred people stuck under the rubble of one building in Islamabad, why has it then completely ignored this badly afflicted area where tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured?” one unidentified survivor told Aljazeera.

The Kashmir earthquake measured a devastating 7.6 on the Richter scale. That makes this particular earthquake the 4th largest on record. The temblor initiated rock slides and mudslides along the narrow, unpaved mountain roads that connect rural parts of the Kashmir with Islamabad, itself hard hit by the disaster. No military on the planet - not even the American military - could supply the kind of relief by air that would make a difference for the 2.7 million people affected by the disaster. And with 40,000 people injured - many of them with broken bones and other crushing injuries that would necessitate surgery to repair internal damage - there is no evacuation plan or rescue scenario that could possibly help more than a fraction of those who need assistance.

It would appear that we have entered an era where a government’s response to natural disasters will be critiqued based on some pie in the sky notion of what some all powerful government should be doing rather than what can humanly be done under the circumstances. Ignorant reporters and suffering victims are least able to objectively assess any kind of governmental response to a large natural disaster since they are stuck with a grasshopper’s view of the relief effort.

A case in point would be the press obsession with what was going on at the Convention Center in the aftermath of Katrina. While conditions at the Center were uncomfortable and people were hungry - and in a few cases dehydrated - rescuers were working frantically to save the lives of nearly 10,000 people stranded on rooftops, on balconies, and even in the attics of houses. The heroic efforts of the Coast Guard, the Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Commission (whose more than 300 boats began rescuing these people night and day almost before Hurricane force winds died down) as well as the National Guard troops, New Orleans Fire and Rescue teams, and even the much maligned (deservedly so) New Orleans Police Department saved thousands upon thousands of lives. But to hear the press tell of it, nothing was happening much to save the poor, black people of New Orleans.

I doubt whether we will be able to regain any kind of perspective on what a natural disaster actually means for people who must endure one. They will no longer be seen as acts of God but rather opportunities for a political opposition to skewer the party in power as the inevitable delays, screw-ups, mistakes, and mismanagement are highlighted and shown as indicative of the incompetence of national leaders. One consequence of Katrina and other disasters like the earthquake in Kashmir will be what I choose to call “The Chicago Effect.”

The great Chicago snowstorm of 1979 overwhelmed the ability of both the city’s snow removal equipment to remove the white stuff as well as the city’s disaster management bureaucracy to deal with the crisis. The resulting political firestorm cost then Mayor Michael Bilandic his job. Incoming Mayor Jane Byrne went out and bought enough snow removal equipment to handle the same kind of snow fall in the future. The problem is that much of that equipment would sit idle for decades because the kind of snowfall experienced by the city that caused the political upheaval comes along perhaps 3 times every hundred years.

So the question arises; do you plan for a “normal” sort of hurricane which governments at all levels respond to fairly efficiently or do you pre-position supplies, have the National Guard (or, more ominously the regular army) on standby, and have all the apparatus needed to deal with a major catastrophe like Katrina ready to go at a moment’s notice? The latter would be ruinously expensive and might be used once every thirty years. But it might head off criticism of the party in power that not enough was done prior to a Katrina-like disaster.

Chalk up one more casualty to Katrina; common sense reaction to an act of God.

New Years 1979 in Chicago was one for the books. While revelers were still out partying, a heavy snow began to fall that eventually blanketed the city and suburbs with 10 inches of the white stuff. “The City that Works” shrugged off the blizzard and went about its routine, bragging as only Chicagoans can brag that no force of nature will keep Chicagoans from going about their business.

The city was to eat those words less than two weeks later.

On Friday night January 12, the snow began to fall. It fell all day Saturday. It fell all of Saturday night and into Sunday afternoon until 22 inches had piled up on the streets of Chicago. Mayor Michael Bilandic, confident that the city snow removal department could handle the crisis, ducked out of the city for 24 hours to attend a function in Florida. By the time he got back, all hell had broken loose.

Plows had broken down. His suggestion that residents move their cars to school parking lots so that side streets could be cleared had gone unheeded because the school parking lots themselves were buried under nearly 30 inches of accumulated snow. De-icing the electric rails with tons of salt resulted in interrupting the current so that the “L” train system was almost totally shut down.

But that wasn’t all. Bilandic ordered CTA buses and whatever trains that were running to bypass inner city neighborhoods so that white sections of the city could keep working. Another storm dumped 18 inches of snow on the city at the end of January adding to the misery. The city ran out of salt. The side streets still weren’t plowed. Uncollected garbage piled up to impossible heights. Those side streets that were plowed had buried people’s cars under 10 feet of snow in some case (many were not able to get the cars out until spring).

The press had an absolute field day. It was discovered that one of Bilandic’s cronies had gotten a $90,000 contract to come up with a study on snow removal needs for the city - a study that nobody could seem to find. Bilandic himself seemed to become unhinged. His sessions with city hall reporters became a series of rambling, incoherent defenses of his actions during the weather crisis.

Meanwhile Bilandic’s primary opponent, a little know politician named Jane Byrne, was making huge amounts of political hay at the hapless Mayor’s expense. Her media-savvy staff never had a photo-op without a pile of snow 10 feet high in the background. She was seen commiserating with snow victims. She had one famous confrontation with a city official who claimed that things were going well. For the rest, she let the Chicago media take over.

Columnist Mike Royko wrote a series of articles on the Mayor’s leadership that that were absolutely devastating in their impact. This was in a time when simply everyone read Royko. He was the Chicago version of Art Buchwald, a cynical, hysterically funny, grumpy watchdog whose book Boss, which told the story of the original Mayor Daley’s shenanigans was a runaway national bestseller. People were now not only mad at Bilandic, they were laughing at him at the same time.

The story’s end was predictable. Bilandic lost to Byrne in the Democratic primary in February (following another 15 inch snow storm) and Byrne went on to become the first female mayor of Chicago.

A study carried out by the city following the crisis - a study done at the behest of the new mayor - showed several major flaws in the city’s snow cleaning efforts, the biggest of which was a decision not to tow cars parked on side streets that failed to clear the curbsides to make room for plows. In addition, Bryne spent millions of dollars on new snow removal equipment, doubling the city’s snow removal capacity.

Every mayor since has silently thanked her.

Lost in all of this drama was the fact that the city actually responded to the best of its ability during the snow crisis. The snow removal plan worked quite well for the 8-10 inch storm that fell on New Years. The breakdown occurred during the once-in-a-century snow fall that followed. There was very little the city could have done differently that would have made the situation any better.

Now, before I hear howls of rage from most of you about trying to compare a snowstorm with the unmitigated disaster being experienced by the people along the Gulf Coast, let me assure you that it’s not my intention to belittle or minimize in any way the suffering of the people in New Orleans and elsewhere. Nor is it really my intent to excuse the government of any failures in planning for the disaster. Rather, I believe there are certain parallels between what the press and the left is trying to do to the President and what the press and Jane Byrne did to Michael Bilandic.

For what ever reason - and I believe that reason has less to do with ideology and more with a genuine feeling of helplessness felt by people who are watching what is going on in New Orleans - the press has pretty much decided that there has been a monumental failure of leadership by the Administration in responding to the disaster.

The President’s political enemies are moved by more partisan emotions of course. But perhaps the scope of the tragedy has blinded them as well to the fact that quite simply, no government on earth could have been prepared in any way, shape or form for the mammoth problems faced by city, state, and federal officials in the aftermath of Katrina. You can plan until you’re blue in the face but what faced government officials starting on Tuesday afternoon was something never before confronted by any government anywhere.

In effect, government officials have had to create an entirely new city on the fly; a city of 100,000 people. A city that not only had to feed and shelter those people, but supply medical services both for the injured and those already sick - even those near death! It had to supply maternity wards for hundreds of women. It had to create out of whole cloth a distribution system to supply those 100,000 people with food and water. And it had to carry out rescue operations that have already saved the lives of nearly 5,000 people. It had to do all this and much, much, more with access to few vehicles and travel on roads that for the most part were underwater.

And to make matters even worse, in the middle of creating this new city, it was decided that those 100,000 people would all have to leave New Orleans and go…somewhere. So the relief effort went from being an attempt to create an entirely new city to the even more difficult task of rounding up and transporting 100,000 people as well as necessitating the finding of shelter for them - many thousands of whom are old and infirm and have special medical needs.

These facts are not being recognized by the press and are being ignored by the President’s enemies. And because of that, Bush is quite simply being “Bilandicized” - he is being set up to take the fall for something that is essentially beyond his or anyone else’s control.

In the end, it may not matter. The Democrats seemed poised to blame the natural disaster on Bush and the Republicans regardless of what the facts are. If that’s the case and if the left’s allies in the press succeed in spinning the story that way, the Republicans are in trouble in 2006.