James Screed of Screedblog pokes his head above the nonsense:

There seems to be a competition about who can be Angrier about Katrina, since conspicuous emotion is now the primary signifier of compassion and concern. Those in the hurricane’s path have every right to anger or sadness or whichever emotion they have. But in the punditry circles there’s an angrier-than-thou mode that often seems intended to establish one’s bona fides as a critic of the relief effort. You may well have a timeline that buttresses your desire to distribute culpability across a broad spectrum of officialdom, but I AM ANGRIER THAN YOU SO MY COMPLAINTS MATTER MORE.

I expect this from some – when the usual suspects that Bush was Criminally Negligent in dealing with the hurricane, you have to recall that the same people said he was Negligently Criminal for not crawling down his Crawford driveway on his belly and licking Mother Sheehan’s boots with his dry cracked tongue, and Criminally Negligent for not requiring Gitmo Korans to be sheathed in a urine-repellent plastic coating. (Remember Gitmo? The shame of America, before this other shame? The shame that came after that other shame?)

It turns out that the state officials turned away the Red Cross from using pre-positioned supplies to alleviate the conditions in NO and the Superdome, “right after the storm passed.” Anyone have any Righteous Anger to spare for them? Or is that blaming the victim? It’s come to this: suggesting that the local officials might be more responsible for, you know, local conditions is now a partisan position. Apparently if you put more responsibility for those actually entrusted with the welfare of a city, you’re one of those “big government is the problem” Reaganite nutcases who wants to devolve everything down to the block level.
http://www.lileks.com/screedblog/index.html