I lived in Metairie until 2002, so when I see overhead shots of the city--much of which are frankly unidentifiable, it hurts. I feel bad for the folks in Biloxi and Gulfport, but many of my students at the University I taught at came from the poorest sections of New Orleans, and many of them relied on New Orleans buses to get them to campus and to work. Because of that, I know that some of them, tonight, are dead, and others are sitting on a piece of baking freeway, wondering where help is, and wondering if anyone else in their family is alive and wandering around flooded streets at the moment.
This actually is not a kick at the administration for the job that they are currently doing, because frankly, the job they're doing at the moment undoubtedly is filled with problems, but it also has been reasonably competent. Yes, it is true that many people wound up stranded and miserable at the Superdome. It's also true that those people are mostly still alive, and have a very good chance of continuing to be so. Of course it would have been nice if the government had figured out a bit faster what to do with those people, but in reality, the government probably projected that if the worst-case scenario happened, everyone would be dead, so this is still a step up and a bit of a bright spot.
I'm not kicking the administration for what they are doing now, but I am going to kick them for what they didn't do before. I don't want to get into a lengthy diatribe on Iraq. That was the administration's priority, we've seen that it was misplaced, but that bridge has been crossed, and those boats have been burned on the beach. Iraq was the easy choice. New Orleans was the hard one. The administration could have spent 10 billion dollars rebuilding old levees, revitalizing the wetlands that keep cities like New Orleans from being wiped out by hurricanes, but instead, that money got loaded onto an airplane at Dulles and flown into Iraq, where it went many places that none of us will ever know about. Halliburton could have been called in 2002 and told that their expertise was needed to help rebuild levees and to make sure that the oil pipelines and rigs were secure against a natural or manmade disaster, but of course if Halliburton had been working here instead of in Iraq, they would have been subject to U.S. best-accounting procedures, and there would not have been as much gravy choo-chooing down that particular train-track.
So no, Katrina wasn't the administration's fault. Sh-t happens. Even with global warming making the storm a bit stronger, that doesn't make the administration responsible for the track that it took. But Katrina's been on the way for the past five years of this administration, and there was plenty of time for the president and his staff to pressure coastal politicians to stop letting people build their sh-t 200 yards off the ocean. There was plenty of time for the president to say, "You know, we think it's really cute that you force your casinos to build themselves on giant barges, but what are you going to do when a giant storm-surge turns them into the equivalent of cattle stampeding in a china shop?" but of course this administration never asked this question, mainly because this administration is not filled with the brighter lights--the best and the brightest--and while this administration is always "certain," as we're told by citizens in poll after poll, certainty excludes doubt, and doubt is what is necessary for questions to be asked.