Alden, I can understand your aversion to polemic. I do agree with you that a significant portion of the problem is attributable to the fact that central national systems don’t respond well to local conditions. But it is indisputable that this administration has:

(a) Treated high-level civil administrative positions as rewards for political appointees, whose experience and backgrounds don’t suit them for the role.

(b) Fought against oversight of companies performing remediation and repair.

(c) Neglected any serious push to deal with Katrina’s aftermath — or really, to do anything but push its Iraq (and Iran) agenda.

If saying so, and condemning them for it, is political, then so be it. Characterizing that legitimate outrage as thinking that Bush twirls a mustache at night is in my view unfair. I don’t care if he loves puppies and shares his candy with visiting babies. The results are what matter to me.

Goddamn. Goddamn Bush. Goddamn.

“gimme a break” should be more clearly directed at the idea of a “war for oil”, not the morality question. The cheapest way to get oil was to buy it through Benon Sevan, back in the day.

I have no direct or second-hand connection to New Orleans. What I DO have is a sense of scale. A destroyed is not amenable to drop-in replacements. Shifting the millions of tons of ruined housing and commercial property is not the work of days – or even single years. And where to put them?

I think the largest lesson of Katrina is simply that those who put their trust in government have never seen how slow it can move, even in a terrible crisis.

I know that there are people who think Mr. Bush goes home at night and wears a glue-on moustache, so he can twirl its tips as he chuckles evilly. I think this is perhaps overboard. Even if it is true of him and his neocon squad of evil, however, they are largely figureheads. The work gets done by echelons below him, and when disaster strikes, people find a way to do the job. That’s less the case in government, where people cling to to their jobs at the expense of getting them done. These are folks who were hired in Regan or Bush 1 or Clinton years – they’ll outlast this administration as well. Lay it to the administration’s charge if the efforts fail – but it’s unnecessary to posit a conspiracy, or make ridiculous statements about how this administration hates New Orleans.

My impression of NO public housing wasn’t all that good, but perhaps I’m conflating Chicago or NYC projects with it. I’d have to hear some good arguments before I’d accept the idea of rebuilding such things automatically.

If they needed to fill space, surely there are more things to complain about than public housing, healthcare privatization and wanton destruction of the schools. Was the gratuitious Iraq stab anything but manipulative?

The loss of property is listed as $85.2 billion. This is a serious pricetag. We’re the world’s richest nation, by far. Why is it not fixed?

Money’s not the issue. Let’s postulate a 2x overhead to replace the property, clear out the old, and keep people housed and well during the repair (which is a wild overstatement of the cost). The government spends that in 2.5 years in Iraq, for scale (remember how the Iraq war is killing us?)

http://www.democrats.org/a/p/the_real_cost_of_the_iraq_war_to_american_taxpayers.html

This page from democrats.org shows how the cash we’re spending in Iraq could be redistributed to feed all the starving children in the world four times over, along with any number of other worthy and heartrending goals. This is meant to demonstrate to me how immoral it is to be spending this cash on a war for oil (gimme a break). What I take from it, however, is that these are not simply cashflow-related problems – otherwise they would be solved, either privately or governmentally.

Private donations to Katrina reconstruction are already over $5 billion. The problem afflicting that area is the same that has blocked reconstruction of the WTC site for the last half-decade – government inefficiency and bickering. Cash and will are not the key issues. Getting the beast to lumber forward, and in the right direction, is what’s taking so long. This is just too hard a thing to fix fast.

As for the poorest being the hardest hit – well, that’s always true. They’re also the ones getting the direct federal help – richer folks rely on their own resources, simply because federal help is the slowest and least convenient. Here’s an illustration for why that’s the case, courtesy of Sen. Lott (R-LA), who seems to exemplify the (bipartisan) nature of government for the Congress, by the Congress.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/kstrasselpw/?id=110009706