Take 2: The speech W should have given

Whitney Gould,in her Journal Sentinel column, on the speech George Bush should have given in New Orleans:

My fellow Americans:

There are a few things I left out from my speech to you last week about how we're going to help the good people of the Gulf Coast recover from the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. When I told you that I am responsible for the problems with the relief effort, what I should have said is that the initial federal response was not just slow; it was incompetent. The heartbreak of watching so much human misery unfold will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Sure, the state and local governments were plenty disorganized. But they don't have the resources that we have at the federal level. If we had taken the time to read and heed all those warnings from our own experts about the effects of a storm like Katrina, we would have been better prepared to lead the charge. We are going to make sure a catastrophe like this never happens again.

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