The Perfect Storm

The fallout from Hurricane Katrina remains pretty damn bad if you're a poor black welfare recipient from the slums of New Orleans.

If, on the other hand, you're a rich, white Republican in Washington DC - it's looking f***ing great.

First off, not only has an entire Democrat congressional district been likely wiped off the map but also - it looks like it'll finally tilt Louisiana into a hard red state:

If evacuees from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans - a reliable bloc of 30,000 black voters that is traditionally easy to mobilize - choose suburban or rural areas over their urban roots in coming years, it could be a political blow to Democrats, said Roy Fletcher, a political consultant from Shreveport who helped elect former Gov. Mike Foster, a Republican.

"It would give a whole lot of a stronger foothold to Republicans in the Legislature and statewide," Mr. Fletcher said. "Louisiana has always been a swing state, a purple state that's both blue and red. You take the Ninth Ward out of that equation and you get a real shot of Republicans winning statewide office."

Second: all that anarchy and violence the natives got up to in the 5-Day Paralysis after the storm hit? - well, it was mostly lies:

....The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. [Mayor Ray] Nagin told [Oprah] Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."

...

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything....Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

But useful lies indeed. Lies that stoked up the worst of human prejudices - fear, mistrust and racial hatred. Lies that helped create a climate in which the military was seen as the only solution.

Lies which have made it easier, indeed preferable, to erode ancient laws protecting the Republic from martial law:

The active duty military is currently forbidden from undertaking law enforcement duties by the federal Posse Comitatus Act.

That law, passed in 1878 after the U.S. Civil War, does not prohibit National Guard troops under state control from doing police work. But, unless the law is changed, it would keep them from doing so in the Gulf region, Bush had asked Congress to consider giving the military control over initial response in dealing with major natural or other domestic disasters.

Of course, Katrina was just a one-off. A 'perfect storm' of massive government incompetency (and as for those levees that should have withstood the storm - let's not even go there) and 10,000 atomic bomb's worth of natural energy slamming into the Gulf Coast.

Well, maybe. And maybe the government wasn't so clueless after all...

White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain why [Department of Homeland Security Director] Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt the need to appoint a separate task force.

Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders.

...

The Department of Homeland Security has refused repeated requests to provide details about Chertoff's schedule and said it couldn't say specifically when the department requested assistance from the military. Knocke said a military liaison was working with FEMA, but said he didn't know his or her name or rank. FEMA officials said they wouldn't provide information about the liaison.

And maybe Katrina wasn't so much a one-off. More like a foundation stone. A way to maximize the potential for catastrophe-level events likely to come:

President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic.

And if you really want to screw with your mind then you can contemplate the possibility that all of this is another move closer to an grim dystopian end-game in which dark powers beyond our ken are plotting to deplete the world of its population and revert us to a pre-feudal slave state.

But that's a conspiracy theory.

So lets just leave it that they're all Keystone Kops and this is coincidence. A fortunate $200 billion, no-bid, profit-enabled buddy's dividend to their absent-minded dithering.

OK then, and good enough. Feeling better already.