Moe : Yesterday, I went to the NYSDMV to renew my driver’s license.  I decided to spend the extra $ 30.00 to get the enhanced version.  I carefully got together all the requested documents except for my Social Security ID card. I lost the last one in a hold-up in the 1970’s and had never bothered to get a new one.

I have managed to renew my driver’s license several times since the 1970’s without needing to show a Social Security ID card.  In fact, at my last renewal, the NYSDMV accepted my Form SSA - 1099 - Social Security Benefit Statement and my Form 1099-R  from the NYS & Local Employees Retirement System to verify my Social Security information.

However, this time the NYSDMV would not accept those documents and demanded a Social Security ID card. They claimed that it was a “Homeland Security” requirement and could not be waived.  I remembered that I still had the first Social Security card I was issued when I got my “working papers” at age 14 in 1952.  I asked if that old card would be sufficient. Thy said yes so I made the round trip to pick up the original card.

When I returned with the card, i thought that my troubles were over.  Then the NYSDMV person noticed that, on the ID card my middle initial was “P” while on all of my other documents, including the Social Security Benefit Statement, my middle initial is a “M.”  I tried to point out that the “P” obviously was a “printing error”  without success. 

I had to go to Social Security where, aftr a long wait, a helpfull clerk made the arrangements for a new Social Security ID to be issued.  It will take a week to ten days before I receive the new card in the mail and can begin the whole procedure once again.  Wish me luck.

There is a documentary being shown tonight on HBO entitled “Trouble the Water.”  It is about Katrina and, having read the review by one of my “usual suspects” - Linda Stasi of the New York Post, I can say that the kindest thing I can say about the filmmakers is that they are are totally ignorant about Katrina and its aftermath.

The initial section of film was made by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a person “living below the poverty line” according to Ms. Stasi. She and her husband stayd, along with their neighbors, because “they had no way out.”  After all, “the government did not provide transportation for the trapped.”  Of course, the government is not identified but we all know it was Bush’s fault.  The fact that Mayor Ray Nagin and others in the city government of New Orleans failed to implement their own emergency evacuation plan is not mentioned or, at least, did not penatrate Ms. Stasi’s brain.

Ms. Stasi states that “FEMA never arrived.”  Of course!  FEMA is to blame!  Just ignore the fact that FEMA is not a “first responder” but, as its title states, the Federal Emergency Management Assistance Agency.  FEMA’s job in emergencys such as Katrina is to provide management assistance and logistical support to state and local governments.  In other words, those who “never arrived” were the first responders from the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans.  Why didn’t they arrive?  In the case of the Louisiana National Guard units designated for hurricane response, it was because Louisiana’s governor, in spite of appeals from her own staff and from the White House, did not call out the National Guard until it was too late for the units to reach their deployment positions before Katrina arrived.

That caused situations such as the FEMA tractor -trailer, loaded with filled sandbags, arriving at a levee to find that the National Guardsmen that were to use the sandbags to re-enforce the levee had not arrived.  Of course it was FEMA’s (and Bush’s ) fault. That tractor-trailer driver from FEMA should have re-enforced the levee all by himself.

The film mentions that 911 operators were telling people that the government is “not providing rescue at this time” but, it is not clear from Ms. Stasi’s column, just what “government” the 911 operators are speaking about.  Of course, the 911 operators are city employees and may have been refering to city government.  To hose who paid attention to what was happening, the fact that many city employees, who were supposed to perform various functions in accordance with the city’s emergency plans, did not go to their emergency assignments but, instead, took their families and fled the city before Katrina arrived.

Ms. Stasi, to her credit, was one of those people who volunteered to drive a truck with relief supplies to the Gulf.  However the fact that she will “never forget” the total breakdown of FEMA  is disturbing.  She remembers something that did not happen.  It was the total breakdown of the city government of New Orleans and the partial breakdown of the government of the state of Louisiana that the documentary should address not the popular fiction of a FEMA breakdown.

I am 70 years old and there have been 11 Presidents in my lifetime. Consider the following about each :

Franklin Delano Roosevelt : When he first ran for President, he was considered an intellectual lightweight. H. L. Mencken called him “an amiable dunce.” The famous “Roosevelt Brain Trust” was put together to convince the voter that, while Roosevelt might not be so smart, he had surrounded himself with smart people. Roosevelt had prior administrative experience as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy during WWI and in two terms as governor of New York State.

Harry S Truman : Did a good job as a commanding officer of an artilery battery of the Missiouri National Guard in WWI, failed in the haberdshery business, was the best Roads Commissioner Missiouri ever had, served in the Senate. In the almost four months he served as Vice-President, Roosevelt and his staff kept him entirely “out of the loop.” A joke in Washington that preceeded Truman’s becoming Vice-President was that the only way a Vice-President could enter the White House was by joining a tour. When Roosevelt died, Truman was completely in the dark, not only about the Manhattan Project, but about almost all of Roosevelt’s policies and programs.

Dwight David Eisenhower : Entered the Presidency with the most executive experience of any President. However, Ike stated that his military experiences as a “chief executive” did not prepare him for the way civilian government worked. He had to learn “on the job.”

John Fitzgerald Kennedy : Our “martyred President.” Underneath the myth, Kennedy was almost entirely without executive experience and, for most of his time as a Representative and Senator, had a well deserved image as a “playboy.” In his first meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, he left Khrushchev with the impression that he was weak and indecisive. Thus, the Cuban Missle Crisis.

Lyndon Johnson : Was a very good schoolteacher in rural Texas before he entered politics. Spent his entire political career in the Legislature, little or no executive experience. Became President when Kennedy was shot. Kept almost all of Kennedy’s advisors. Big mistake! Where Kennedy knew his advisors and was often skeptical, Johnson took their advice at face value,

Richard Milhous Nixon : Probabily the best prepared man to enter the White House since Thomas Jefferson. When he was Ike’s Vice-President, Ike treated him in the manner he would have treated a deputy commander in the Army. Nixon was completely in the loop and was given assignments and projects to administer. In other words, Eisenhower trained Nixon to be able to take over if anything happened to Ike. That was the military way to handle a deputy commander not the political way.

Gerald Ford : Our first unelected President. A creature of the legislature with little or no executive experience. The less said the better.

James Carter : A former Naval officer, an enginering officer on a nuclear submarine, a successfull peanut farmer and governor of Georgia. His best qualification for office? “Trust me, I will never lie to you.” The smartest man elected since Thomas Jfferson, he was a micromanager with little understanding about the world’s peoples, cultures and politics.

George H. W. Bush : An experienced executive with good credentials in government service, He was too much the bureaucrat to be really effective.

William J. Clinton : A complex character with a mixture of virtues and vices hereto unknown in American politics. Had executive experience as Attorney General and then as a two term governor of Arkansas. Because of having a Republican Congress, he had to accept many Republican programs. Most of the political credit he now claims is for programs that the Republican Congress forced him to accept.

George W. Bush : Had executive experience as a businessman and then as governor of Texas. Responded well to crisis situations at home and abroad but was either unable or unwilling to fight the MSM when they misrepresented or distorted his record.

As to our two current candidates :

John McCain : His only executive experience was in the Navy. He did command, successfully, the Navy’s largest fighter squadron, but, as Ike found out, that experience does not translate well when dealing with civilians. His saving grace is that he knows not only his strenghts but his weaknesses.

Barack Obama : No real executive experience. A creature of the legislature with all of the failings of such. To see how Obama would fare as President, look at John Videt Lindsay’s two terms as mayor of New York City. After Lindsay, the city faced major financial problems either caused or aggravated by Lindsay’s manifest shortcomings as an executive.

It is ironic that, of the four people running for the offices of President and Vice President, the most qualified executive is Sarah Palin.