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Yesterday I spent a few hours answering phones for a Red Cross fundraising event. Someone from the local Red Cross headquarters announced that we were “this close” — very close — to having enough refugees from Hurricane Katrina here in town to open up a shelter.

Some of the phone volunteers wondered: is that good news or bad news? It is very good news, we were told. It means people are getting out of the storm-ravaged areas, and into places where they can be helped.

We were told that the Red Cross was not currently providing any help within New Orleans, because the government would not allow them to go in. Apparently someone in the government thought it would send the wrong message if the Red Cross provided water, food and medical care inside New Orleans, and people would start returning to the city. So the Red Cross waits at countless locations outside the disaster area, waiting for the chance to help refugees.

Last January, conservative columnist David Brooks discussed George W. Bush’s second inaugural address on the PBS News Hour:

I guess I’d say the president has meticulously ruled out the possibility that he might be a mediocre president. He is either going to be a great president and get a lot done, or he is going to be a complete failure

The “great president” or “complete failure” question was settled this week, I think.

David Brooks, yesterday on the PBS News Hour:

This was really a de-legitimization of institutions. Our institutions completely failed us, and it’s not as if this is the first in the past three years. This follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.

We have had, over the past four or five years, a whole series of scandals which have soured the public mood. You’ve seen a rise in feeling that the country’s headed in the wrong direction. And I think this is the biggest one, and the bursting one. And I must say, personally, it’s the one that really says, “Hey, it feels like the seventies now,” where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let’s get out of this mess. I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just — people are sick of it.

Yesterday I quoted E.J. Dionne quoting William Cohen:

Government is the enemy until you need a friend.

Today, via Wonkette, Chrisafer casts doubt on an old Ronald Reagan applause line:

The ten most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the Federal Government, and I’m here to help.”

Not so.

This week should be the watershed for the whole “me first,” every-man-for-himself ideology that has governed this country for almost twenty-five years.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne:

The sight of rescue workers, the police and the Coast Guard, governors, mayors, and federal officials struggling desperately with the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina brings to mind Cohen’s Law: “Government is the enemy until you need a friend.”

…

You wonder if this summer, with deteriorating conditions in Iraq and now this terrifying act of God, might make us more serious. This is said not to be a time for politics, and we can surely do without the petty sort. But how we pull our country together, make our government work at a time of great need, and share the sacrifices that war and natural catastrophe have imposed on us — these are inescapably political questions.

How can we look Katrina’s victims in the eye, say we care and yet not take account of how their needs should affect the other things government does? I’m sorry to raise this, but can it make any sense that one of the early issues the U.S. Senate is scheduled to confront this month is the repeal of the estate tax on large fortunes when we haven’t even calculated the costs of Katrina? And why do we keep evading a national debate over who is bearing the burdens of a war that has dragged on far longer than its architects promised?

Katrina is the work of nature, but what happens from this point forward is the responsibility of political leadership. Is it possible that in the face of a catastrophe of this magnitude, Washington will not even bother to rethink our nation’s priorities?

Last October, National Geographic foretold the New Orleans disaster. Yesterday, George W. Bush said no one anticipated it. Daily Kos shows that there’s a pattern here:

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t — yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.

We can only pray that the Big One — the dreaded massive California earthquake — doesn’t occur while these guys are in charge.

To those suffering in New Orleans, it may seem that the government has turned its back on the city. But that’s just frustration and paranoia, right? Right?

Maybe not. Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House, apparently wants to make it official:

It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s seven feet under sea level, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said of federal assistance for hurricane-devastated New Orleans.

“It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” the Illinois Republican said in an interview Wednesday with the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois.

So, what’s going on here? Did New Orleans vote for John Kerry in the 2004 election, or something?

(The distorted map, called a cartogram, is explained here.)

They thought the worst was over in New Orleans. Then the levees broke, and 80 per cent of the city was flooded.

The ongoing disaster in New Orleans is exposing lots of weak spots and cracks in government policies and in the execution of those policies. We could not prevent Hurricane Katrina. Can we, at least, learn something from this tragedy? Given the current administration in Washington, John Moltz doesn’t see much hope:

These are not people who change policy based on facts.

Ever.

Really. They have never, to my knowledge, done this. They have changed policy for political gain or to buy time until the policy can be subverted to their pre-conceived agenda.

This disaster could not have come at a worse time in our nation’s history. The people in charge of this country will not seek to fix, they will not seek to aid, they will not seek to rebuild, they will not seek to heal.

They will seek to profit in whatever way they can.