When MSNBC Wants an Expert on Hurricane Preparedness, They Naturally Turn to...Ray Nagin

File this under Not. Making. This. Up.

You don’t even have to watch the video; Nagin doesn’t say anything useful. Sort of like when was mayor.

As the blogger most responsible for finding the infamous buses of New Orleans during hurricane Katrina — buses Nagin was unable to find despite being mayor, but which I and others found on Google though we were hundreds or thousands of miles away from New Orleans — allow me to enjoy a hearty laugh at MSNBC’s folly. They really aren’t even trying to be a serious news network anymore.

Consulting Ray Nagin on hurricane prep makes about as much sense as consulting Tony Romo on winning big games. It makes as much sense as consulting LeBron James on how well he plays four full quarters. It makes as much sense as consulting Barack Obama on creating jobs, or Joe Biden on keeping your mouth shut. It would be more productive to ask Czar Nicholas II about the best way to defeat Communism.

Simply put, Ray Nagin is Exhibit A in how not to handle a hurricane. But he’s a Democrat, so he’s credible to MSNBC. Why didn’t they think of having a Blanco-Nagin Failure Reunion, and get them ready to go out with Obama on his next Magical Misery Tour?

Don’t get me wrong, NOLA had a hurricane plan. But it was a mostly fake plan drafted to kick the hard decisions down the road, and Nagin had failed to learn the lessons of hurricane Georges, as Chris Regan and I wrote back in 2005. As we wrote at the time, Nagin’s New Orleans had–

Plans, working groups, more plans, an in-progress DVD, a near-miss, a relieved sigh, a folding of the hands, and then back to sleep. The city and state had directives to plan the planning session to start the process of making a plan, but little in the way of any real plan to deal with a real disaster. So the buses sat in their lots. The winds and the floods came, the unlucky local officials kicked in Plan B, and the city of New Orleans drowned with its least fortunate trapped inside. The evacuation plan was a plan, but it was really just a ghost plan with ghost buses and ghost drivers, with ghost emergency supplies kept in ghost “shelters” under control of a ghost police force with a ghost emergency communications system overseen by a ghastly governor.

It was a plan for a ghost town. That plan worked.

And here come the ghosts.

Dodging failure, opining on a ghost of a cable news network.

(h/t NewsBusters)