Hurricane Katrina

Formed over the Bahamas in late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina soon escalated into a Category 5 storm, the most powerful ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond its meteorological characteristics, however, leading theologians believe it was sent by God in order to demonstrate the nearly limitless depths of incompetence, indifference, and sheer contempt for all that is decent of which the Bush Administration is capable.

A complete list of the government's failures in handling Katrina would be long enough to use up all 10 meg of this wiki. However, it is possible to list some highlights.

The true catastrophe of New Orleans, one of the few remaining vibrant, unique and dynamic cities in America, was not that Hurricane Katrina wiped it out; it is that flooding, an easily-anticipated side effect of Hurricane Katrina, wiped it out. The loss was eminently preventable, most notably by a simple shoring up of the seawall and interior levees by the Army Corps of Engineers, but this project was never carried out. Presumably because the Army needed all of the funding to buy candy for children in Iraq. When it became apparent that an entire major American city was about to be wiped out, the Department of Homeland Security, who presumably exists to take care of little hiccups such as that, occupied itself elsewhere and Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown read show-jumping magazines. Inexplicably reluctant to declare a state of emergency, order an evacuation, or assist with disaster preparation, the federal government whistled while New Orleans drowned, and left it up to desperate, scrambling local officials to deal with a nearly unprecedented catastrophe on their own. (This in marked contrast to [9/11], where the Bush administration saw a disaster they could use more to their political advantage and stepped in right away.)

Once the scope of the devastation became clear, God gave the Bush administration their cue to begin acting like the plutocratic jackasses they are. The president himself, who, taking a cue from Nero, had pretended to play the guitar while Louisiana families sat on the roofs of their ruined houses and watched their relatives drown, seemed puzzled as to why everyone didn't just hop in their cars and head to their summer homes; his mother, Barbara Bush, spared a few chuckles for the lucky indigents who seemed to her to have won the disaster aid lottery; and Michael Brown seemed to find the entire thing inconvenient, e-mailing his subordinates inhumanly bland notes about what shirt he planned on wearing and heaving sighs at having his busy schedule interrupted by an actual federal emergency. When the president finally arrived on the scene, he proved once again his inability to muster even a tiny scrap of sympathy for fellow human beings in need, choosing instead to reminisce about his good-time fratboy years in Houston and ensure his multimillionaire friend Trent Lott that his house, at least, would be rebuilt. [Tom DeLay] asked a couple of homeless children if they were having fun hanging out in a crowded, undersupplied football stadium like refugees; Michael Chertoff, immediately following his claim on national radio that he didn't think there were any people trapped in the SuperDome, dismissed the entire disaster as somebody else's problem; and Dick Cheney, as Dick Cheney will do, ignored the whole thing.

The media had their part to play, as well, overreporting on looting by blacks while ignoring the later, and much more ambitious, looting that would take place during reconstruction by whites. They also accepted at face value claims of anarchic jungle savagery inside and outside the SuperDome, printing as gospel reports of young children raped to death and emergency rescue teams fired upon; all of these stories turned out to be bogus, but the damage, as it so often is, was done. With a frustratingly small number of exceptions, the media likewise failed to challenge the Bush Administration's constant dissimulating and ass-covering throughout the entire affair; rapper Kanye West was widely ridiculued for his rather sensible claim that "George Bush doesn't care about black people", while Bush himself got pretty much completely off the hook for, well, not caring about black people.

With the flooding receded, the citizens returning, and the floodwalls being rebuilt (sort of), Hurricane Katrina -- perhaps the most disastrous and shameful chapter of a Bush presidency filled with shame and disaster -- fades from the national memory. But the damage is still being done: the preparation for future such hurricanes is already underfunded and poorly planned, a reliably Democratic voter base has, perhaps deliberately, been scattered all over the country, and, just as happened after the great Chicago Fire, ruthless developers are snatching up ruined homes and newly vacant lots all over the Gulf region in hopes of transforming them into cash cows, a naked piece of profiteering that wouldn't be tolerated...if George W. Bush wasn't the president.