August 28, 2012 - 11:53 am
So what we have is this comparison:
Katrina — Bush begs Democrat Governor for days to allow him to call
out the National Guard, Delay is Bush’s fault.Isaac — Republican Governor Jindal begs Obama to call out National Guard.
I wonder who the media will report is at fault this time?
I always thought the National Guard was under the command of the governor and the Reserves are under the command of potus.
Regardless how it turns out, according to the media, anything good is Obama’s doing and anything bad is Gov Jindal’s fault.
A governor can call out the NG for “state active duty” on the state’s hook for wages and other liabilities and using state resources; they become essentially a group of state employees. When they are “federalized,” i.e., called out by the POTUS at the governor’s request, they become federal troops under federal command and have access to federal powers and resources – and federal pay; the real issue.
We in Alaska had several ocassions where we had to call the ANG to state active duty for wildland fire fighting; it is one Helluva mess unless you have everything in place already. You don’t have wage scales for them, they aren’t on your employee rosters, in your payroll system, all that bureaucratic stuff that you suddenly find you REALLY, REALLY need, and all sorts of stuff still goes wrong.
The only time I’ve ever gotten anything resembling an apology or an “attaboy” from a newspaper editor was a nightmare story; we’d had some ANG on state active duty for a large wildfire in the Fairbanks area. After they served the State on the fire, they were called up to federal active duty and sent to Iraq. As we were auditing the fire and making our claims both to our “Disaster Relief Fund” and to federal wildfire fighting funds, we discovered that several of the Guardsmen had been paid twice; the kind of stuff that happens in any max effort kind of situation and for which we had processes. We sent them the required notices and gave them the opportunity to say their piece in rebuttal, etc. Instead of making an objective argument that they were entitled to the double pay or signing the very generous repayment terms we’d offered them, they, in the form of their wives, ran to the media with a tale of woe and the evil government taking their hard-earned money away from them. For once a newspaper called looking for the other side of the story and it ended with an editorial saying we’d done the right thing and the Guardsmen needed to repay their ill-gotten gains. That’s the one time in 30 years though that I thought I’d been treated fairly by the media.
Obviously it’s W’s fault still.