The jaw-dropping problem, for which heads will have to roll, is that they DID have such a plan.

The Mayor just didn’t implement it.

If your question is would the catastrophe have been avoided if there were more advance planning, more troops and equipment evailable, better communication, or better hands at the wheel, then my answer would be: not avoided but certainly ameliorated. For example, I think it is also a prima facie case that if you let a political appointee run FEMA, rather than someone with experience in emergency management, you will get a much less effective operation. It is hard to quantify what the difference would have been, but giving the reins to someone who has to learn on the job is a reckless thing which is bound to have bad results. Would any company hire a division head with no experience or knowledge of the industry?

I can’t speak for others, but I’m certainly not excited about this — Katrina is a tragedy of enormous proportions, and the fact that government ineptitude exacerbated the pain is not a pleasant thing. Whether it backfires or not: I doubt it, but who knows — I call them as I see them. I have nothing against Republicans: I didn’t vote for Governor Arnold, but I think he is doing a damn fine job (and would vote for him if he runs again). I also have nothing but admiration for people from the right like Scalia, Bob Dole, Margeret Thatcher, and maybe even Orrin (Orren?) Hatch. I don’t agree with them on much, but I respect their intellect and their principles. Even George Bush Sr. wasn’t that bad. It’s just this guy — I think he has brought dishonor to this country in many ways, and I believe that it will take a generation to fix everything that he has done wrong.

You guys are getting a little too excited about this, politically…watch out, it may just backfire…

Why? Well, as noted above, shrinking government will lead to diminished resources. More importantly, perhaps, a President can only achieve so much in four or eight years, and an administration can fairly be judged on what it thinks is important. Much of Bush’s Presidency has been absorbed by the wars in Iraq and Afganistan — I would argue that this was part of the reason why the government could not handle Katrina, but I respect (though disagree with) the argument that 9/11 and the war on terror necessitated an aggressive foreign policy.

However, on domestic policy, Bush could have focussed on the boring but essential tasks of government, which certainly includes infrastructure maintenance and preparation for disaster relief. It’s a cheap shot to say that if Bush spent less time trying to stop gay marriage, impede stem cell research, and dismantle Social Security, then the government would have been better able to respond to Katrina. However, I think there is some truth there — by making ideological issues the centerpiece of his domestic policty, he did not make coastal protection a priority and hence it suffered (along with the electrical grid, water supplies in the West, etc.) Trying to cut the budget for coastal protection (as Bodman did in July) is one part of the problem — the larger issue is the attention paid to “wedge issues” which are appealing to his base but have little to do what the government should really be doing.

I think it was Bill Purcells who said that you are what your record is. In other words: don’t complain about bad umpire calls, poor luck, or anything else — you are no better and no worse than your won-loss record. I think the reason that Bush II gets much more vitriol from the left than Bush I or Reagan is that we really think that he is off the charts bad. (The suggestions by Karl Rove and others that we are unpatriotic because we feel differently doesn’t help). The response to Katrina is emblematic of an administration which we feel is much more concerned with things which are at best peripheral to what government should do (e.g., the wedge issues) than with stick-to-your-knitting things like providing adequate funding for the Army Corps of Engineers.

My own opinion is that this summer has seen the tipping point for George Bush — it’s game over now. The events of this week, combined with the majority opinion that the war in Iraq was misguided, have left him in a hole from which he will not recover. I’m not joyous about having an impotent President — I remember Carter in 1978 and 1979 — but (in my opinion) the less George Bush can do, the less he can do wrong. Maybe there is a silver lining in all of this.

“For two or three days, nothing happened.”

In terms of the Federal response, that’s just not a reasonable description of what happened — though I can understand if you’re watching CNN why you might think that it is.

For example, here is the D.O.D. briefing from Wednesday on what they’d already done, were doing, and were planning on doing at that point. Highlight: 7,200 military and 11,000 national guard on location (about half in Louisiana and half in Mississippi, with some in Alabama and Florida), a number that was to double over the next day or two. But, seriously, read the whole thing. Most of what they were doing in the days before the hurricane and immediately after was setting up the infrastructure to provide the needed aid.

Perhaps we should have a system in place whereby the Federal government can react even more massively and rapidly to such a disaster. Perhaps the Pentagon should receive 911 calls and manage all firefighting efforts and domestic disturbance calls from their situation room. That’s not the system we have, it’s not the system we’ve had under Democratic presidents, and it’s not a system anyone has seriously proposed before.

Point two: well, we are dealing with hypotheticals here, so who knows.

Point three: if so, then do the results speak for themselves?