Fallujah on the Mississippi

The unrest is getting worse in New Orleans as desperation increases among those who haven't been able to get out:

Fights and trash fires broke out, rescue helicopters were shot at and anger mounted across New Orleans on Thursday, as National Guardsmen poured in to help restore order across this increasingly desperate and lawless city.

"We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where corpses lay in the open and he and other evacuees complained that they were dropped off and given nothing _ no food, no water, no medicine.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the government is sending in 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to help stop looting and other lawlessness in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Already, 2,800 National Guardsmen are in the city, he said.

But across the flooded-out city, the rescuers themselves came under attack from storm victims hungry, desperate and tired of waiting.

"Hospitals are trying to evacuate," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. "At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.'"

Some Federal Emergency Management rescue operations were suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington. "In areas where our employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we have pulled back," he said.

A National Guard military policeman was shot in the leg as the two scuffled for the MP's rifle, police Capt. Ernie Demmo said. The man was arrested.

"These are good people. These are just scared people," Demmo said.

The Superdome, where some 25,000 people were being evacuated by bus to the Houston Astrodome, descended into chaos.

Huge crowds, hoping to finally escape the stifling confines of the stadium, jammed the main concourse outside the dome, spilling out over the ramp to the Hyatt hotel next door _ a seething sea of tense, unhappy, people packed shoulder-to-shoulder up to the barricades where heavily armed National Guardsmen stood.

Fights broke out. A fire erupted in a trash chute inside the dome, but a National Guard commander said it did not affect the evacuation. After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving at the Superdome for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up.

Read the whole article; it gives you a little glimpse of what can happen when order breaks down. I'd hate to think what Los Angeles would look like if we had the "big one".

I think one of the major subjects in the postmortem on this disaster (after they get done trying to blame President Bush for everything) will be the apparent lack of effort on the part of the State and Local authorities to move people out before the storm hit. Yes, they declared a mandatory evacuation, but for those folks who rely on public transportation to get around and don't have a car (and who are mostly poor with few resources available), it doesn't appear there was a concerted effort to provide them a way out of town or someplace to go. They were stuck, and a lot of them are still stuck.

I heard one radio host comment this morning that when elections come around, the Dems can always find a way to get these people to the polls, but when disaster was looming, the Dems that ran the town couldn't figure out how to get people out of harm's way. It is kind of ironic.

The left is furiously trying to blame Bush for all of this, from global warming to budget cuts, and even to claims that the Feds didn't respond as quickly as they could have because most of the victims were black. It's the same old Dem playbook.

However, if we're ever going to be fair, you have to look at the leadership in Louisiana, both current and past, to see how the conditions were set-up which made this disaster all but certain. There's a fascinating article at AmericaThinker.com which will give you a good insight as to why New Orleans is such a mess, and a city like Houston is now able and willing to bail them out. New Orleans could and should have been America's oil capital, but corruption drove the business to Houston, and now Houston is a huge success. You can read it here (h/t Rush).