White House to Kansas; tough luck so shut up already.

Once again we are seeing that when the ability of a state to provide disaster recovery to it's own citizens has been reduced and the blame for that decreased ability is placed squarely where it should be, on the current administration in the White House, the response is denying responsibility and questioning the competence of your local and state government officials.
Katrina should have been a wake-up call to most Americans as to the true nature of the powers that be.

White House spokesman Tony Snow responded curtly to questions today regarding the state of the Kansas National Guard's ability to provide disaster relief following this past weekend's tornado outbreak. "We are eager to provide what Kansas needs," Snow said. "But again there are also -- you also have to go through the process of making the request first." The translation to what Snow said in his complete response is, "You have incompetent leaders in Kansas."

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the Kansas National Guard, like every other state, no longer has the equipment it once had. 60% of the Kansas National Guard's equipment is no longer in Kansas, it's in Iraq, where it has either been destroyed or left in theater because of the Army's logistics orders which keeps them there instead of being shipped back when the units rotate home. Kansas, like the other 49 states, is left to provide disaster relief with far less equipment and personnel than they are required to have due to the war in Iraq.

When the White House deflects the root cause of this lack of equipment by calling into question the capabilities of local officials they are following the same path they took following the Katrina debacle. I'm not in the least bit surprised by their response to the Governor's comments about their National Guard equipment issues. I'm planning on writing a longish piece on this phenomenon at some point in the near future. What I can say now is to not be surprised by the White House's response. If you don't know already, all of us are on our own. When a mass of people die in this world, it pleases those who hold true power in America and the world at large. This is the subject of the future post.