The reports in the news media of people shooting at rescuers have been puzzling, and it has been obvious that the storytellers didn’t know much about it. Now thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I’ve seen some reports from apparently informed people, especially this first hand account that includes repeated instances of government agents creating enough problems that reasonable people started treating those agents as threats. Also this report and this quote:
3:32 P.M. [Monday] Ben Morris, Slidell mayor: We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we’ve heard that they’ve gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they’d better be armed because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them deprive our citizens.
Add to this Louisiana’s refusal to let the Red Cross into the disaster area, and it becomes understandable that residents have been treating some government agents in a less friendly fashion than Gaza settlers have been treating their government.
Preliminary evidence suggests that many local, state, and federal officials ought to lose their jobs over this, but we should be patient about judging individual people until more people who were on the scene are able to make detailed reports.
And let’s not forget the government employees that did something right. The weather service didn’t screw up. There are reports of National Guard and LA Fish and Wildlife employees doing good jobs.