I for one would love to see a GOP convention with a giant split screen, one side with mesmerizing live cameras on Hurricane Gustav and the other side showing Yosemite Sam McCain throwing one of his famous temper tantrums to get attention.
Reality is, those people in Texas and Louisiana wouldn't have made it out (pardon this one, "if their lives depended upon it"). There are those that simply won't leave, means or not. Then there's the reality of traffic pure and simple. Living in South Florida and seeing it first hand. We're talking about rush hour traffic, the people of Miami can't drive and leave in an orderly fashion when the sun is shining, there is no imminent threat of storm and they are simply going to work or school. What used to be a 3 day leave window before the masses evacuated in bumper to bumper caravans of traffic on every major highway North and out of FL is the same issue in Texas and Louisiana and in my estimation is now 5-7 days and that is even aggressive for South FL.
The hurricane season that brought Katrina and others. There's simply too much traffic. I drove from Miami to Daytona to Orlando and the evacuation was a nightmare in many areas. Miami to Orlando wasn't bad. But after helping family secure that house, later that evening the evacuation had turned into a bigger nightmare even into the rural areas north of Orlando on I-75 and Highway 441. 4 lanes into 2 lanes of that volume of traffic is the problem there, the bottlenecks strangled any attempt at an evacuation. That was 2 days before any hurricane actually hit. Here you go, this is precisely what traffic was about that time and for several days:
http://www.musiccitybloggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/deep4.jpg
And it entails "running out of fuel", "bumper to bumper traffic" where you move a car length or two at a time". There's only one thing missing from the scene, And that's all the @ssh*les trying to drag their boats out of South Florida behind a gas guzzling RV that helps make running out of gas a reality. It's not bad enough everyone gets a 400 mile fuel tank to make it to somewhere near Georgia when they do 60-70 mph, they simply don't go/move. You're lucky to get 250 miles out of the same tank of gas and that drive goes from 3-4 hours for 250 miles to that long to go an hour or two North of the downtown hub of Miami. as for getting to a more rural area, there isn't enough gasoline out in the middle of nowhere, not enough service stations and fuel can't get there fast enough to cover the mass exodus. Miami to Jax is 350 miles, that's 5 hours, not during a hurricane evacuation. It might be from Jupiter Inlet and North, but Ft Lauderdale and further South to the Keys and you might aas well forget it. It's logistically impossible to move South Florida out in that time frame. And FL is relatively developed for tourism, not implying New Orleans isn't, but Louisiana isn't as developed as FL. There are costs, the more population you have, the infrastructure is more developed, but that population can only maintain so many resources to accomodate itself and a large city the size of Miami in an evacuation situation. It's like saying everyone in Miami is going to Islamorada for Labor Day. There just isn't enough fuel, food and lodging there and where would an airlift be to deliver those supplies, especially with the unknown of storm debris. It's logistically impossible and we've become a society that blames the Govt. for everything when something does go wrong.
Anyway, the point is, Katrina wasn't Bush's fault, a failure of FEMA or Republicans or Democrats or anyone else. There were abuses and what happened there falls on those people. My estimation and opinion, there's only so much infrastructure to get people out, then there's only enough infrastructure to rebuild and get supplies, aid and whatever else in the aftermath. What ever made it into the area that was fraudulently mis-directed at least was an attempt to help and expedite the process. The fraud falls on individuals that abused the process of disaster aid.