Much is being made lately of the 'blame game'. This person says it's Blanco's fault, for turning away supply caravans at the border. That person says it's Nagin's fault, for leaving hundreds of busses to drown. This other bunch says it's symptomatic of the general state of government in Louisianna, where 'corruption' is really just 'business as usual'. The moonbats say it's all George's fault, because he's personally responsible for the global warming that caused Katrina in the first place. Or maybe it's Brown, or perhaps Chertoff...
... who cares?
I respectfully submit that 'who did... or didn't' is a silly question to be asking right now. What we need to know is not who did or didn't do something,,, but just exactly what is it that did, or didn't, get done.
I don't mean in general terms, because the broad aspect is quite obvious.
There was a hurricane. 36 hours or so after the hurricane came through, flood walls broke and around 80% of New Orleans flooded. Caught in that flood, was a city of just under half a million people, roughly one-third of whom were still home. I suppose it would depend on one's perspective of 'hell' to decide when it really broke loose, but break it did. There were tens of thousands of unsupported people stuck, primarily in two small areas of that 1/5th of the city that stayed dry. They stayed there, unsupported, for several days.
Asking 'who' questions will wind up accomplishing virtually nothing, because individual people come and go, blown on the winds of public sentiment and media airworthiness. (the NOPD chief has already resigned)
The real question is, what should* be done to assure that the things that did go wrong, won't again.
Obviously, the first thing that must be done is to step back and take a good, close look at the factual realities surrounding Katrina's aftermath. This is much more difficult than it might seem, because, as ever, a whole lot of wrong information is now firmly entrenched in the public perception. That the entities who did the entrenching are now quite reluctant to correct that perception is another story entirely. The initial reaction among the general population tended toward complaining that the Fed didn't react to the NO situation according to the news outlets.
Problem: the news outlets were feeding rumors into the cameras and most of those rumors were false.
So, perhaps one of the questions that we should be asking is: "Okay, you were saying that 'Bush shouldn't have been listening to his advisors, he should have listened to CNN', but have you considered how much worse the situation would have gotten if he had done exactly that?"
Brown is the current target for everyone who rides the SODS (Somebody Outta DO Something!) bus for the cameras. He will wind up crucified in the public memory, and deserves very little of the crap that will eventually land on his plate. He's not taking it lying down, however.
He [Tom Davis, chairman of the Congressional Committee 'investigating' Katrina response] pushed Brown on what he and his agency should have done to evacuate New Orleans, restore order and improve communication.
"Those are not FEMA roles," Brown said. "FEMA doesn't evacuate communities. FEMA does not do law enforcement. FEMA does not do communications."
It won't matter.
This leads to, arguably, the biggest question of the bunch: "Do you really want the rules on exercise of authority changed as much as would be required to let the Fed handle all this?"
No, of course not, but will it stop people from b*tch*ng when it doesn't anyway?
HELL no!
Landrieu is already on record as being opposed to giving the Fed authority to become first responders. I think the short version of her complaint is: 'cake, have, eat'.
This is an interesting position, given Blanco's then-current argument: namely, that the Fed should have been there at pretty much the same time the storm was. (notwithstanding that she sort of waffled for some time regarding actually giving the Fed authority to do so)
Nagin,,, Nagin is a whole post unto himself. [okay, not even I completely avoid naming names (well, I probably could have,,, but I didn't)]
The difficulty comes in when you have a Federal political structure that is populated with career politicians. A tough thing to avoid, sure, but they will react to perceptions, rather than realities, and in situations like the aftermath of the Girls in the Gulf, the 'perception' is that the Fed should take the blame when anything goes wrong.
Problem: the politicians within the Fed know this, and don't like looking less than useful, regardless whether or not they should even be involved. The bureaucracy, true to form, will react to the perceptions, which, right now, are built on a towering mass of uncorrected misinformation.
It will feel good in the short run, but will cost all of us a huge amount of tax money, and an unknowable amount of security when the Fed erases yet more barriers to its exercise of power.
* One must make the distinction between what should be done about a situation like this and what can be done. I submit that we are going to wind up with what can be done, and that is a sorry state of affairs.
As ever, the ultimate two questions will eventually be: Was it worth it?
... and did anything change for the better?
:-) Add eggs and vanilla, blend well. 
