“I’m not sure where we will go or what we will do,” Home, in Baton Rouge, where she and her children stayed for fiveĭays before her mother’s husband, she claims, kicked them out. Rising water, Porter found a temporary respite at her mother’s “Not for my family.” After driving through Morial Convention Center, where lack of food, inhumane conditions,Īnd the threat of violence forced Porter back onto the road. They first sought refuge at the Ernest N. Shirley Mae Porter, 30, arrived at the River Center afterĪ harrowing journey that had begun when the levees broke, flooding Post-Katrina, it earned a hard-won reputation as Louisiana’s largestįully functioning shelter, home to as many as 5,000 New OrleansĮvacuees, complete with medical clinic, pharmacy, and counselingĬenter.
Known for hosting such headliners as Kid Rock and Tim McGraw. (On September 8, a Zogby poll had him at 41 percent.) Politically, Bush was wounded, never to fully recover, his standing made all the worse as the economy tanked in 2008.ĭERONTE JONES, ARIONNE PORTER, SHIRLEY MAE PORTER,ĬHERYL PORTER, HENDRICK PORTER, AND ELWIN GILLAMīefore the hurricane, the Baton Rouge River Center was best Accordingly, his approval rating sank to the lowest level since he had taken office. The national media rightly ripped into Bush like never before. Instead, Bush monitored developments mostly from afar. The White House should have moved mountains to help New Orleanians in need. Bush, furthermore, embarrassed himself by flying down to the Gulf and claiming that “Brownie” was doing “a heck of a job.” Just as New Orleans’s levee system catastrophically failed to work (breaking in about 50 places) Bush had catastrophically failed to save lives.īush’s incompetence was ultimately responsible for the ineffective federal response from August 29 to September 2. Chertoff, for one, acted as if New Orleans wasn’t actually flooding and, instead, went to an avian flu conference in Atlanta. In the immediate aftermath of the storm and its carnage, the president, who was able to find his sea legs the week of 9/11, couldn’t find his gut, much less his heart. More than any other event of his White House tenure, Bush’s slow response to Katrina made Americans ask if he was a “bunker” commander, relying too much on cautious paper pushers such as FEMA’s Michael Brown and Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff. Instead, Bush acted as though he were disinterested in the natural disaster. Within two years, he charged into the headwinds of a war that cost billions, decimated cities, claimed the lives of thousands of allied service members and hundreds of thousands of citizens and enemy combatants-the ramifications of which we are still confronting, in horrific ways, to this day. Foreign policy and military strategy were not George Bush’s fortes. But soon enough, he was going after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose regime had absolutely zero to do with the 9/11 attacks. When the president emerged, addressing the nation in a formal televised speech, it was in a role in which he was comfortable: the aggressor intent on taking revenge against al-Qaeda, against the Taliban who had harbored them, and against “the people who knocked these buildings down” (as he said, a few days after the attacks, bullhorn in hand, at Ground Zero). After the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Bush was virtually unseen during the first 11 hours, making only brief statements and effectively ceding the public leadership role in the crisis to New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
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