Righteous Indignation - I am SOOO pissed

I've been fuming for the last couple days about the slow federal response to Katrina. I've been keeping quiet, as my knowledge about this disaster and the efforts undertaken are relatively shallow.

No longer. I read a transcript of New Orlean's Mayor Nagin being interviewed by CNN, and the efforts and pleas he has been engaged in trying to get some help to his flooded city. In that interview, CNN relays that Bush's people say they have been slow because they haven't been asked to help by the proper people (what about the Governor of Louisiana or the Mayor of New Orleans?!): "Because apparently there's a section of our citizenry out there that thinks because of a law that says the federal government can't come in unless requested by the proper people, that everything that's going on to this point has been done as good as it can possibly be."

I call bull$hit on that. Absolute poppycock. You show me a law that says that the federal government can't intervene in emergency situations and I'll show you the Haymaker riots in Chicago in 1886, the National Guard mobilizations during the Civil Rights era to integrate segregated States. In each of those cases, the federal government moved in spite of State protests to stay out. Lives are being lost and Bush makes excuses and hides behind some "law" his lawyers have dug up.

Yet again Bush is hiding behind partial truths to mask his incompetence.

I used to think that Bush's failure to get the FEC breathing down the colluding (as good as admitted because of the billions in settlement money, and conveniently avoided by impeccably-timed bankruptcy filings) energy companies' necks during the California energy crisis was due to some political motivation to get a Republican in the governator's office, or due to his being essentially bribed by the energy companies. It was the only way I could see a president failing to act while a State which represents 1/8 of the GDP of the entire country was being violated during a nationwide recession. I see now that it was merely an extension of his general policy of enforced incompetence in all affairs, foreign and domestic.

New Orleans residents are feeling the storm front between the reality of our federal system and the Republicans' illusions of Jeffersonian confederacy. State sovereignty is not inviolable, and especially not when FEMA has been very specific about the danger to New Orleans for years. Paul Krugman's NY Times Op-Ed piece "A Can't Do Government": "Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans."

The response necessary was completely foreseeable, and completely feasible. A hurricane is a predictable event (within a week or so) - the federal government knew about the potential scope of the disaster and should have been ready.

Now two of the three major disasters listed by FEMA have happened. I can only hope that Americans put a non-moronic administration in before the third happens.