Ray Nagin: Profile in Courage

Once, maybe twice a generation, a hero rises among us. Is it hyperbole to call Nagin a hero? You be the judge… From the greatest article ever written in the history of the AP:

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin writes in a new memoir that he was the only one to understand how to recover from Hurricane Katrina, and that he endured plots against him and incompetence around him as he set his plan in motion.

That and more is in the recently self-published memoir from Nagin, who was mayor before, during and after the Aug. 29, 2005, storm that flooded 80 percent of the city and took more than 1,700 lives. Nagin writes in “Katrina’s Secrets: Storms After the Storm” that he was the only one who understood the storm’s dangers and tried to get people out of harm’s way before it struck. After the storm, his one-page plan to get citizens back to a restored New Orleans disappeared, likely taken by someone who wanted to write a book, Nagin writes.

I can almost anticipate what some of you hating haters of hate are thinking: “wait, did he just say that the plan to restore New Orleans was one page?” Dude, when you are as smart as Nagin, you don’t need a three ring binder for this stuff. He could have done it on a post-it note. And who took it? The Klan. In league with an international cabal of 1 page plan stealers.

“I had a target on my back as the guy who stood in the way of their vision of a new New Orleans where mint juleps would once again be the drink of choice in a bleached, adult Disney World-like city,” he writes….

Nagin discusses conspiracy theories and “shadow governments” aimed at undermining him, including “men dressed in black combat outfits and adorned in bulletproof vest, rifles, and leg straps holding at least two very large handguns each,” storming into a meeting and saying they were there to protect the mayor. Another involves others running suspicious wires from the roof of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where Nagin was holed up, around the door to his suite.

I knew it, I just fricken knew it. You guys laughed at Cynthia McKinney when she told us about the “credible reports that the U.S. military dumped 5,000 prisoners — each with “a single bullet wound to the head — in Louisiana swamps using Hurricane Katrina as cover“, and now we know who pulled off this heinous (please pronounce as high-anus) deed. It was the Mint Julip White Liberation Front.

While in Dallas shortly after the storm, Nagin met with a group of white businessmen, with a lone black man among them, that was determined to “keep certain residents out and to shut down parts of New Orleans forever.” Yet Nagin appointed the leader those businessmen to his 17-member “Bring New Orleans Back Committee.”

Nagin said he was chosen by God to lead the city out of the storm. God also answered Nagin’s prayers by sending a brief rain shower to cool the people packed for days into the Superdome after the hurricane, preventing a potential riot, he said.

He’s like a modern day Moses, if Moses just said “Fug it, this desert looks as good a place as any.”

The ex-mayor, who has set up a business in disaster consulting, writes that he urged everyone to leave the city before the storm hit. He also asked churches and neighbors to take those who were sick or could not afford to evacuate. And finally he provided city buses to take people to the Superdome — the so-called shelter of last resort.

The city “planned for food and water to sustain up to twenty-five thousand sheltered people for three days,” Nagin writes.

But Doug Thornton, vice president of SMG, the company that manages the Superdome, said there were no plans before the storm to use the stadium as a general shelter. It could be used, he said, to house people with medical needs.

Of course Doug Thornton said that, he knows the black people don’t like football. If Ray Nagin says it is so, it is so. To believe otherwise is just like burning a cross on a lawn.

Nagin also claims that an effort by some residents to leave the city by walking over the Mississippi River Bridge and out through Jefferson Parish, only to be rebuffed by gun-wielding police, was actually part of a “freedom march” designed to go to the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge to call attention to the city’s plight.

Nagin said he and Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who was brought in to oversee the post-Katrina evacuations and clean up, planned the march only to have it stymied when Blanco’s office leaked word of it to parish officials. However, Honore said he recalled no such conversation.

“The only discussion I remember was about having the people march through a shopping center to reach the buses,” Honore said. “Anything else was never on my scope.”

Honore is obviously stuck on stupid, and a liar.

So, here’s to you Mr. Mayor. Through your leadership and courage, we now know about the dastardly plot to whiten-up New Orleans. You are a hero to many of us.

Category: Politics