Bush personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation

per La. Governor Blanco (emphasis added):

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In the face of a catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, a mandatory evacuation was ordered Sunday for New Orleans by Mayor Ray Nagin.

Acknowledging that large numbers of people, many of them stranded tourists, would be unable to leave, the city set up 10 places of last resort for people to go, including the Superdome.

The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.

The date on the article is 8/28/05.

I’m sure the usual suspects in the "blame W" crowd [note to Bang: I’m not talking about you :)] will be lining up at the mikes in groups of 20 in order to apologize to the President for accusing him of not doing anything in advance regarding Hurricane Katrina.

Via Powerline. A hat tip to Smitty in the comments section of Matt’s prior post for the heads up.

(Cross-posted at BlogsForBush)

More: Who should the media be focusing on more?  John Cole points out New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s negligence and predicts:

FEMA has made some mistakes, but when the post-mortem is done on this, Mayor Nagin is not going to be the Great American Hero some have deluded themselves into believing.

Bryan Preston on Mayor Nagin:

Mayor Nagin and his emergency sidekick Terry Ebbert have displayed lethal, mind boggling incompetence before, during and after Katrina.

[…]

As for Mayor Nagin, he and his profile in pathetic leadership police chief should resign as well. That city’s government is incompetent from one end to the other. The people of New Orleans deserve better than this crowd of clowns is capable of giving them.

If you’re keeping track, these boobs let 569 buses that could have carried 33,350 people out of New Orleans–in one trip–get ruined in the floods. Whatever plan these guys had, it was a dud. Or it probably would have been if they’d bothered to follow it.

Bill Hobbs:

Nagin is screaming for buses now, but when he had them he failed to use them. People aren’t dying in New Orleans today because of what the federal relief effort is or isn’t doing. People are dying in New Orleans today because Mayor Ray Nagin failed to get them out before Katrina hit.

People are dying – perhaps by the thousands – because of his failure.

The evidence is pretty compelling.  The media isn’t digging around into Nagin’s actions (I know, hard to believe, right?) but instead focusing on the President.  Thank goodness for the blogosphere, once again doing the job the hard investigating that the MSM won’t.  My advice: read all the info you can about who did what before the hurricane, note who’s job it was to do so, and draw your own conclusions.  Don’t rely on the media to draw those conclusions.

Update 1:30 AM ET:  Blogger D.C. Thornton, in the comments section here, makes a great point worth repeating:

I’m probably going to catch hell for this, but I’m going to say it anyway.

It’s more convenient to blame a white president for what went wrong than to hold a black mayor and his administration accountable for gross negligence and failing to fully carry out an established emergency preparedness plan.

To hold Ray Nagin and his administration accountable for dropping the ball amounts to letting loose the shouts and cries of “Racism!”. It’s sad, it’s wrong, but it’s standard operating procedure for the media and left-wing black leadership.

Yep.

Don’t forget you can still contribute to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief Fund or any one (or more!)  of a number of other great organizations out there mobilizing to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  If you do contribute, please log it here at the TTLB contribution page as he is tracking the amount of money raised from each blog.  Logging it is totally anonymous – in other words, you don’t have to give a name.  Just an amount, the charity you donated to, and the blog that encouraged you to do so.

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