Editorial | The Katrina Videotape Fully unprepared

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, March, 2006

If President Bush was a Boy Scout, he must have missed the meeting on being prepared.

That conclusion emerges from a just-released videotape of the Aug. 28 briefing the President got on Hurricane Katrina a day before the storm hit the Gulf Coast.

The inattentive, incurious president on that tape sadly fits a pattern that's become all too familiar in this White House: failure to grasp the scope of crisis, unwillingness to heed warnings from aides, reluctance to meet the demands of active governing.

The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast deserved better. The country deserved better.

In the videotaped Katrina briefing, a raft of officials - from former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael D. Brown to Max Mayfield, director of the...