A Theory of Everything
Maureen Dowd in Saturday's Times skewers the Bush administration:

In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared.

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

The fact that they were all on vacation is bad politics, but the truth is that this is what rich people do the week before Labor Day; I'd bet that between Bush, Cheney and Card, they haven't worked a month's worth combined over the last week of August in their entire lives. (Rice probably had to work until around when she got that oil tanker named after her.) It's not what they've done this week; it's what they've done for the last five years. I don't know what Michael Brown did to merit consideration for his job, but I'm pretty much mortally certain it had nothing to do with emergency preparedness or disaster management, and a lot to do with political dependability and personal ties to some Bush or other.

To a greater or lesser extent, the same could be said of pretty much everyone in the second-term administration. The somewhat independent-minded folks--Colin Powell, Paul O'Neill--are gone. For that matter, so are those who might have their own political ambitions, like Mitch Daniels (now governor of Indiana) and John Ashcroft, who still probably sees a future president in the bathroom mirror, which hypothetically could have moved them to counter the administration. Only the loyalists are left. Their agenda is Bush's agenda; that's it.

What this means is that there will no voice inside the administration to say what must be said: that three issues of crucial importance to the nation--global warming, homeland security, and energy dependence--are now and henceforth will be inextricably bound together. We're failing to solve any of them, and their combined impact probably represents the greatest threat our country has ever faced.

I haven't seen anything in the news or the blogs connecting climate change to the various water-borne disasters of the last year: the tsunami, flooding in South Asia, Hurricane Katrina. I assume this will come with time, as scientists tend to approach these loaded questions with greater prudence and care than do pundits. What's not in question is that the damage done to the Gulf Coast has sparked an oil shock in the country, on the eve of one of the heaviest driving weekends of the year no less. In the current Atlantic Monthly, obviously written before the hurricane struck, a writer blasts the recently passed energy bill:

Somewhere in the vast spaces of the Energy Policy Act, you might think, room could have been found for actions that actually addressed the two main energy-policy challenges of the next decade: global warming and the national-security implications of dependence on imported oil. But no, the authors of this purportedly comprehensive law mostly chose to concentrate on... urgent battles to win on subsidies and tax breaks for their respective energy-producing constituencies.

The cost of fuel has been rising fairly steadily for the last several years. I don't know (though I've wondered often enough) at what point, if any, it will get high enough to really trigger behavioral change on the part of commuters and corporations; what I do think is likely is that the cascading effect of higher prices, on everything from produce to plane tickets, will make itself felt in our consumption-driven economy. A responsible government would get out in front of this change, encouraging conservation and the pursuit of alternatives; they also would have anticipated the easily predictable problem we're currently facing. (Given the nature of the world fuel supply, the only surprise here is that it was domestic production that was disrupted.) Those who view government as a means of enrichment, on the other hand, will do as they in fact did, larding the bill with giveaways.

I don't pretend to know what the answer is. History suggests that there are no problems we can't solve; from slavery to fascism, we have always--eventually--found an answer and made ourselves stronger. What really frightens me is the notion that the venality and indifference to real suffering that characterize the Bush administration and Republican-led congress--which has announced that it will go ahead next week with measures to repeal the Estate Tax--somehow reflects a rot within the American character that has spread beyond the point where it can be contained. Any criticism of the administration's response to the hurricane will be shrugged away as "politicizing the tragedy"... by the same people who somehow turned their tragic failure on 9/11 into greater opportunity to gorge at the public trough.

From calling on the best in Americans, our political leadership now seems to exist only to exonerate our worst, most selfish natures. While this is the case, how can we rise to the occasion as a people?