OK, I totally lied...

...when I said I was going to stop posting Katrina-related stuff. That was a silly thing to say, really, given that the consequences of this week's events are going to play out long-term and in ways we can't even predict, and which I'll probably be moved to babble about.

And in so doing I'll probably incense some people I've seen deploring the "politicization" of this disaster, which on one level I get--making electoral hay out of ongoing suffering and death is debased--but on the other hand, you know what? While hurricanes may be utterly apolitical, the action (or lack thereof) taken in response to them is almost entirely a governmental affair, beyond the scope of private organizations or individual citizens, and as such is inextricably political in nature. Politics infuses the whole thing, from our very conceptualization of the role of government in local affairs to the detailed logistics of relief deployment, and the consequences of Katrina hit every level--perhaps most importantly at the very top, by which I don't mean the Oval Office and who happens to occupy it, but the larger debate about the role and responsibilities of government.

Which said--I just wanted to note in this post some strange bedfellows who are joining in the chorus of outrage about the mismanagement of the disaster. Lately I've seen conservatives/Republicans voicing anger and shame just as vehemently as us long-time Bush-loathers have been. killabeez has been quoting such overheard conversations from her right-wing Florida neighbors. And Andrew Sullivan (who's been on a roll this past week) recently posted an e-mail he received, which (as Sullivan himself writes), says it all. And in his latest entry he quotes a fellow conservative blogger, Martin Kelly, on the status and future of neoconservative ideology: "...what can an ideology based on the global projection of national power do when confronted with a crisis which shows it to be nationally powerless? Nothing. The collapsed levees of New Orleans will have consequences for neoconservatism just as long and deep as the collapse of the Wall in East Berlin had on Soviet Communism; for when hacks and fulminators like John Podhoretz are openly criticizing the president, the Great Leader, the ideology is on the way out. And hopefully all of those who urged the ideology on, myself included, will have a long time to consider the error of our ways."

ETA: If you can get the video to load, this Fox News segment from last night with Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera is pretty amazing. I have long *despised* Fox News, but one got the clear sense that these two guys have broken loose from Central Control; Smith bitter, hard-faced and scathing, and Rivera, hysteroid as usual, but seeming genuinely moved to the point of tears and freaked-out incoherence by the suffering in the convention center, and both of them yelling back at that asshat O'Reilly.

(no subject)

I haven't seen these publicized very widely ... an amazing collection of images by Vincent Laforet, a New York Times photographer. The rescue ones are good, though not all that different from other photos/film we've seen, but the pictures of evacuees at the New Orleans airport are stunning. (This, this, and this are especially impressive and chilling.)

(no subject)

A quote from Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security, just scrolled across the bottom of the screen on CNN:

Katrina "breathtaking in its suddenness."

Uh, let's see. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground called it as a major threat to New Orleans on the afternoon of Friday the 26th, which was *three days* before landfall. The NWS made it official Saturday morning. The federal disaster declaration (for what that was worth) was -- Sunday, right? Hell, by 7 a.m. Sunday morning even *I*, complete ignoramus average citizen, was engaging in public freak-out about what was getting ready to happen.

I dunno, maybe Homeland Security takes the weekends off. Maybe to Chertoff a couple of days lead time *is* "breathtaking suddenness." Maybe Homeland Security expects that, oh, let's say, the next terrorist attack will be announced a week ahead of time, with engraved notices giving details of location and probable effects. (Lord knows nobody had *any* advance ideas about the probable effect of a hurricane strike on New Orleans, right?)

(no subject)

In contradiction to the headlines at CNN's website, New Orleans station WWLTV reports that the last people left in the Superdome and convention center have finally been gotten out of there. (See entries timestamped 4:23 and 4:47.) What's still unclear is how many dead bodies were left behind. What may never be known is how many of those dead would still be with us if either the evacuation, or at least the provisioning of food and water and medicine, had been conducted with any sort of dispatch and competence.

I am, in any event, enormously glad for those who did survive and get out. And I'm selfishly glad that I can close down the part of my brain that's been running scenarios all week of the suffering going on in there.