Next time, don't shut the door on the whistleblowers.

"Not historically significant."

too little too late. When will the Congress, the MSM, and the typical schmuck on the street realize that W's party, unlike the Gipper's which cost only about one trillion dollars, will cost mucho multiples of that, all for the joy of having a far RW PNAC agenda implemented?

"But he doubted that dismay over the response would have much political impact in next year’s mid-term elections. “You can hardly lose an election in the House of Representatives unless you murder someone on the Capitol steps,” he said. “You have to be pretty stupid to lose re-election.” Hamilton served 34 years in the House. Keane said he feared that government officials might have been influenced by early news reports that the storm had skirted New Orleans and that the city had emerged largely unscathed. “I have a feeling everybody went ‘whew,’ ” he said.
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We need to break that cycle. The problem with Congress is we keep re-electing the same idiots whose allegiance is to the almighty dollar and those lobbyists supplying same. Not only should bushco* be held accountable but also their collaborators in Congress. We need to make sure 2006 is a veritable House cleaning. Literally.

2006: Time for a House Cleaning!

The Moral of the story is:

"Do not count on your government to save you, even care for you in the slightest way. You are on your own. When Bush came into office, it became "Darwin's Law".

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The key sentence here is, "anyone watching this storm" would have known. There is your answer. No one in the Bush group was watching, because they didn't care. They were on vacation.

when the parties involved were on the same page:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/07/fema/print.html
(need a day pass if you're not a subscriber)

(snip)
Under the Clinton administration's FEMA, with (James Lee)Witt as the head, a storm of Katrina's magnitude would have prompted federal and state officials to actually meet in order to coordinate their response. "You were all working together to anticipate needs," (George)*Haddow says. "You're all sitting in the same room when the things happened -- the Midwest flood, the Northridge quake, the Oklahoma City bombing and all the disasters we responded to. We were in the same room together and nobody had to point fingers."

Close coordination with state officials was key to the Clinton administration's capacity to act quickly in the heat of a disaster, Haddow says. "We had a really solid partnership, so we received solid, timely information from the ground. Then we managed that information and turned it into a mission assignment." In other words, when people on the ground needed something, they knew who in the federal government to ask, and when the federal government had extra resources at the ready -- cops from Chicago, say, or water from Wal-Mart -- it would know where to send them. Contrast that situation to what happened after Katrina, when both Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, and Michael Brown, the FEMA director, admitted to several reporters that they had no idea that people were starving at the New Orleans Convention Center, even though the grim scene there had been played and replayed on television all day.
(snip)

FYG:
* James Lee Witt was head of FEMA during the Clinton Administration.
George Haddow was deputy chief of staff at FEMA.