As Richard Baehr pointed out in a piece debunking media myths about Katrina at the Web site The American Thinker, the feds arrived 48 hours after the flooding began. We know that these were two days of despair and suffering for the 20 percent of New Orleanians unable or unwilling to heed the mayor's tardy but still pre-storm evacuation order. We also know additional lives were lost in those terrible hours, victims of both nature and predatory man. Yes, a shorter lag time, if humanly possible, would have been better. The question is, should these interim hours become the permanent Ground Zero of a still-unfolding crisis?
Democrats seem to think so. Wading a few steps into the massive disaster, Democratic leaders stop, clutching their political footballs and hitting the president for being "on vacation" (Harry Reid) and "oblivious" (Nancy Pelosi) to the earliest aftermath of the hurricane. They seem to regard their attacks and hearings and commissions as a fleet of lifeboats out of the whole mess. Such sniping would be frivolous if the disaster weren't so serious. Learning from the failures in pre-storm preparation and post-storm reaction is instructive, but such lessons don't apply to the enlarging crisis at hand. In other words, not even the president's presence in the White House Situation Room -- the Pelosi solution? -- would have prevented the 30-foot storm surge from making a fabled city, not to mention the rest of the Gulf Coast, unlivable.
The ultimate arrival in New Orleans of "the cavalry" -- federal aid in Chinooks, on jet skis, on horses -- didn't end this story. It only closed the first chapter of a national tragedy. The problem Katrina now poses isn't one of hindsight; it's the future of the Gulf Coast. We don't need multimillion-dollar commissions to teach the hurricane's lessons -- for example, that state and local evacuation plans should be carried out, not ignored, the next time a massive storm threatens a major population center below sea level. But even after these lessons are learned, the essential problem remains: what to do next.