IN KATRINA'S WAKE New Orleans mayor fears CIA to take him out Nagin says he has been yelling at governor, president -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: September 3, 2005 7:00 p.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he's feeling better about his city, he feels confident he has gotten the attention of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President Bush, but he said he fears the Central Intelligence Agency may take him out because he's been yelling at these officials. He didn't say it once. He said it twice. Last night he told a reporter for the Associated Press: "If the CIA slips me something and next week you don't see me, you'll all know what happened." Today he told interviewers for CNN on a live broadcast he feared the "CIA might take me out." Nagin resorted to vulgarity and profanity yesterday in his pleas for help. But he was actually calmer today, despite the hyperbole. Nagin said Bush gave him a "hearty" greeting and did not seem at all offended by Nagin's earlier outburst. "I do think the pleas for help basically got the nation's attention, and the nation's attention got everybody to stop and re-evaluate what was going on, including the president. ... He basically said, 'Look, our response was not what it should have been and we're going to fix it right now.'" Nagin said evacuation has been hampered by officials' difficulty grasping where state authority ends and federal authority begins and he said he very frankly urged Bush and Blanco to get a clear chain of command straightened out immediately. http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46134 ------- Sorry if this has been posted. What do you think about this?
I think he's gone a bit paranoid. No one blames him for the way he handled things, or what he said. His city needed help that it wasn't getting, he had to do something to get their attention. If only all mayors had his balls.
I think Mayor Nagin should get more sleep. He probably has several years left to live anyway... the line must be rather long. Keep D&D Civil!!
What scares me is that he may actually know something since he was a mayor of such a large city. Of course, the situation can also really scramble his perception. The thousands of dead bodies littering his city, the lack of movement by the federal government and the inevitable lack of sleep can cause any sane man to become out of touch with reality. Imagine being a survivor of this horror! The psyche of a survivor will be forever scarred. Will the survivors who were left in the Superdome for days be able to recover? How can we help them after they were neglected?
I wouldn't really blame him for what he said...from a human standpoint, it is understandable that he lost composure. On the other hand, one has to wonder whether he could have developed a better plan before-hand how to use resources in the case of an evacuation (e.g., the many buses). But I guess it is not yet the time to ask the question who is to blame to what extent. This question will come sooner or later, though.
Also, I saw an interview with him an hour or so ago on CNN where he said that President Bush said to him he was ready to take immediate steps, but the governor of Louisiana had told him (Bush) that she needed 24 hours to think about things. I think this was referring to the beginning of the crisis.
I do agree with that. I should have clarified my point to I don't blame him on how he went about prodding the national government after the fact.
this is leadership. i've been VERY critical of the federal response. but this mayor leaves something to be desired. one question: when you issued the mandatory evacuation, did you send in buses to get people out who couldn't get out otherwise? how about hospitals..did you do anything there? until the hurricane makes landfall, it's a state/local response. i'm underwhelmed. before and after. state/local and federal.
One of my Sunday School classmates is a NC National Guardsman. He pointed out that it would take 48 hours to mobilize any National Guard "troop" that wasn't already so mobilized to respond to any situation. Then it would take a certain amount of time to raise and move transportation intended to evacuate citizenry. It's all very complicated and the complication doesn't allow many mistakes of over-caution. Does anyone else remember the early reports that NO had once again dodged a bullet?
That's because it looked like they had. I thought they had, the storm had passed and the city wasn't under water. Than the levees broke...
That mayor is an idiot. A childish idiot at that. Telling the government to "get off their azzes" and saying that the CIA wants to take him out are just idiotic ways to deal with others. He's being defensive for a reason - his leadership is poor.
The neocon supporting media figures (Tucker Carlson, Scarborough, O'Reilly) were already attacking Nagin yesterday.....their utilized logic was that Nagin is black so he should be held accountable for his own people's plight........guess those Iwreck comments he made in that Thurs nite radio interview didn't go too well with the Establishment..
I don't blame the mayor for his anger. He is sure to have made mistakes in the few days before the disaster, but he is merely the mayor of about 500,000 people, not the President of over 260 million Americans. I think Bush should resign. He has failed his country, and continues to fail it. Keep D&D Civil!!
Poor leadership seems to be a prerequisite for holding a position in our goverment today from the top post in Washington to the mayor of New Orleans. In the mayors defense, seeing some of your constituents floating dead in your city could cause one to act in an odd, paranoid manner. So what is Bush's excuse for acting like a moron? What confuses me is why Rick Perry and Bill White are actiing in such a rational manner. It so not the polictian of today.
I don't blame Mayor Nagin at all and actually think he's been doing a good job given the situation. I don't think any major city could evacuate in three days on its own. He's the Mayor of the city of New Orleans and if it took a rant from him to get more attention to his city faster I think that was the right thing to do.
Exactly. Say what you want about that rant - it got the attention of a lot of people, and within 24 hours of that, things started getting done. Whether it was attributable to that or not, who knows - bit it certainly didn't hurt anything and may have helped. His pre-hurricane efforts may have been underwhelming, but he's the only of the political leaders that's understood the sense of urgency in this thing.
