Katrina's death toll caused by bureaucratic sludge

I'd like to say the worst is over, but with thousands of unrecovered bodies still floating around the city of New Orleans, I doubt that it is. As the public's anger over the over-delayed and limping rescue efforts grows, the question on everyone's mind is - what went wrong? The WaPo reports on the first answers that have begun emerge from the drowned city.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Read the whole thing. It's a eyeopener that amply illustrates the problem with this administration. It's all about process designed to accumulate political power and has nothing to do with results that accrue to the common good. They don't think that highly of "commoners" among the elite ranks of the "ownership society."