"Contemplate what the floods of New Orleans have washed up into our own American living rooms: a gasping President Bush who cannot explain how, four years and tens of billions of dollars after 9/11, his Homeland Security apparatus couldn’t manage its first real challenge; a top federal-disaster official whose previous post was director of an elite horse-breeding association and who has been revealed to have no skills other than acute political sycophancy; an American infrastructure hollowed out and impotent from decades of bipartisan erosion and underfunding; several hundred thousand previously invisible, mostly black, very poor people of the sort we have become accustomed to not thinking about very much; and to top it off, a presidential Mother Bush who has done the best Marie Antoinette impression since the sacking of Versailles (saying of the homeless refugees in the Astrodome that they “were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them”)."

The rest is here.