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I'm still in DC attending a conference, but this thought cannot wait....

Isn't a disaster on a scale such as this precisely the thing the federal government is supposed to have been preparing for since 9/11? Why then, as even President Bush has himslef admitted, has the response from the government been so utterly ineffective? With a hurricane we have advanced warning. And this is the best they can do? What will happen if, god forbid, terrorists stage a major strike in a major US city without any warning? What does this say about what this administration has been doing for the past 4 years to prepare and protect this nation?

UPDATE: Having just spent a few minutes catching up on blogs around the sphere, its all far, FAR worse than I thought.

The president says we couldn't have seen this coming? ThinkProgress reports that just over a year ago, FEMA held a 5 day exercise to prepare for an event so similar its almost scary. But despite this the response, as even the president has surprisingly admitted, has been pathetic? Why?

Kevin Drum has all the answers. For nearly 4 years, this administration has been downsizing and privatizing the federal government's domestic emergency response capabilities. Surprising? Of course not. It fits perfectly with a belief that government is the enemy of the people, not the people itself. To Kevin:

FEMA was downsized and partially privatized because Republicans think that's the right thing to do with federal agencies. Budgets were limited for levee construction and first responder training because Republicans have other priorities. The federal government was slow to respond to Katrina because conservatives believe states should take the lead in looking out for their own needs. George Bush talks endlessly to the cameras about the private sector helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast because that's the kind thing conservatives believe in. Liberals, by contrast, believe in a robust role for the federal government. We believe in sharing risk nationwide for local disasters. We believe that only the federal government is big enough to coordinate relief on the scale needed by an event like Katrina, and that strong, well managed agencies like FEMA should take the lead role in making this happen.

And all that talk of "compassionate conservatism?" When Speaker of the House Hastert is saying things like this, when Bush himself is using the tragedy to joke about sitting on the porch with Trent Lott after its all over, the true nature of their "compassion" is on display for one and all to see.

As Amy Sullivan reminds us, challenging the GOP on this isn't about politics, its about people:

We've heard the warning "this isn't about politics" over and over in the last few days. The hell it isn't. And I don't mean kicking Bush while he's down, just for the fun of it, although there are surely liberals eager to do that. For the rest of us, however, we're seeing the awful real world consequences of conservatism play out on our television screens. This is why we're liberals. We don't yell about poverty and racial disparities for kicks. An evacuation plan that consists of telling people to get out on their own is not an evacuation plan.

But its the article Amy link to in Salon by Joan Walsh that really grabbed me. Please, PLEASE reaed the entire thing. Here's just a taste:

The nightmare in New Orleans has a lot to tell us about poverty: the desperate poverty of the city's African-American population, of course, but also the poverty of political debate in the U.S. today. The crisis unfolding before us -- dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president's dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome -– rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country, it's excruciating to watch. But I'm especially struck by the inability of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve, the intractable social problems that have come together in this flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical. ..snip.. As I watched buses make their way from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston, in a surreal and perverse echo of the Freedom Rides of the '60s, a few thoughts were inescapable. Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? And what is really going to happen in Houston? These are dispossessed people who've been further dispossessed -- do we have a word for that? After a few days, the Superdome is already a slice of hell, with overflowing bathrooms, fights, rape allegations and now, people dying outside. Do we expect the Astrodome -- abandoned by the Houston Astros in 2000 for Enron Field, excuse me, Minute Maid Park -- to fare much better? Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium -- we couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried...snip.. On cable news, our normally buttoned-down blow-dried correspondents, almost all of them white, are cracking under the strain of bearing witness to the suffering and even death of the people who weren't looting, who did the right thing and headed to the Superdome, only to find a worse hell awaited them. They've dropped their script and they're asking tough questions. CNN's Chris Lawrence was clearly shaken describing what he saw: "We talked to mothers holding babies, some of these babies 3, 4, 5 months old, living in these horrible conditions ...These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at some of these mothers your heart just breaks ... People need to see this ... what it's really like here. We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the convention center, and there's no one to come get them." Later, Anderson Cooper was even harsher, challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu for thanking President Bush for his efforts to aid her state. "Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting," he said. "For the last four days I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi ... You know, I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians thanking one another, it kind of cuts them them wrong way right now. Because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours and there's not enough facilities to take her up. Do you get the anger that is out here?"

And now, I've been sitting here for five minutes trying to figure out what to say next, but I'm lost. The right constantly claims that we're supposed to be a "Christian nation." Fine. Wasn't it Jesus who said that it is how we treat the "least among us" by which will be judged? Doesn't that standard apply equally to nations as to individuals?

Life isn't about what we do for ourselves. Its about what we do for one another. That might be the language spoken by Republicans, but it is clearly not their actions.

The era begun by Reagan of "government is the enemy" needs to end. And it needs to end now. We the people, we ARE the government. Government isn't something that exists "out there," something that gets in our way as we try to live our lives. Government is, as even our founding fathers understood, our collective response to collective problems. Yes, of course, government is not the answer for everything. But in an enormously complex society of 280+ million people, there are many MANY problems that only a large federal government can solve. Peace and prosperity doesn't happen on its own. It takes all of us working together to make it happen. And although it may be hard for the GOP to accept, quite often that means government must get involed. If Katrina doesn't make that clear, I don't know what will.

UPDATE II: These pictures are just heartbreaking.

UPDATE III: I may just have to leave this as an open and constantly running post. Publius weighs in before he wieghs in. Here's his first thoughts:

But it's more than race. Katrina has also, for the moment anyway, pried open our eyes -- Clockwork Orange-style -- and forced us to gaze upon the human face of poverty. The invisible statistics have materialized into visible breathing people wasting away at the New Orleans Convention Center. On this issue of poverty, Brown said something that I found very revealing on Nightline. He said that part of the problem was that FEMA was not expecting so many people to have remained in the city. After the hurricane passed, thousands suddenly appeared out of the woodwork so to speak and no one knew they were there. But these people have always been there -- they were just invisible to most of us (myself included). But when you do see (when you are forced to see) the scale and magnitude of the poverty in New Orleans, it makes you wonder why the richest nation in the history of the planet Earth would allow so many to live in such squalid conditions. And you wonder what exactly that says about our values.

Values: 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.'

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