Brownie Points

Thousands - I suspect tens of thousands- of Americans are dead. 9/11 is yesterday's apocolypse.

Soon a hard number will form around the final toll of the dead- mothers, children, old men and women, often abandoned long before the Hurricane. That number will enrage America. A week's haziness and half-attention by the administration may prove more deadly to Americans than all of Al Qaida's homicidal fetishes.

The hurricane exposed the breakdown of public health, the need for coordinated, intelligent policy by government for the general welfare of the people.

It put us in a position of turning down help from Fidel Castro.

Maureen O'Dowd in the NYT:

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.
...

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.

David Brooks, signalling a sea change in conservatives, rakes Bush over the coals of basic competence.

The catastrophy opened the latent sense of brotherhood and generosity of Americans, who were suddenly shaken out of the sense of security, shaken out of ignorance of real poverty and structural racism, shaken out of the unexamined assumption of a benign society, shaken into the heart's desire for good government. Perhaps, America might be shaken out of the layered, lying mythology of the far right that posits social darwinism - the only Darwinism getting into the country club these days- as morality.

In the twist at the end, Americans realize they need each other, are obligated to one another. The estate tax repeal, Social Security "reform", doomed. A one policy government of feeding bales of wealth to the wealthy was always cancerous, and after Katrina, it appears to be coughing up blood.