Krugman on Katrina

Paul Krugman has a blog entry on Katrina:

A Katrina mystery explained

One of the many mysteries during the week of Katrina was the absence of military help. I picked up on this in the column I wrote during that time:

Even military resources in the right place weren’t ordered into action. “On Wednesday,” said an editorial in The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., “reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics. Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!”

One thing I remember about that time was the smear campaign carried out against anyone who suggested that the federal effort was inadequate. In particular, any suggestion that the military wasn’t doing its part was — you guessed it — denounced as an unpatriotic attack on the honor of our troops.

And now we know the truth. The military wasn’t doing its part, because Donald Rumsfeld refused to deploy troops until almost a week after Katrina hit.

The Bush administration was a disaster. He was the typical incompetent offspring of the rich. He dilly-dallied. In the case of Katrina, he and his administration were guilty of dereliction of duty. It was criminal. I fumed that I could have loaded up my car and driven to New Orleans, a 3000 mile trip, faster than Bush dispatched assistance to the people trapped on roofs, on overpasses, in the SuperDome, and in the Civic Center. I marveled that a Canadian mercy ship dispatched from Nova Scotia arrived on the Gulf Coast before any major US rescue ship. Bush was a disaster. And the odd thing is that the right wing ideologues still worship him for his tax cuts and deregulation and indifference. But the rich have always been indifferent to the poor and their suffering.