Connecting the Dots

Have you noticed the Hurricane Katrina story changing lately? At first it was the kind of thing that most news stations do on auto-pilot -- a big storm is coming, let's show the radar image over and over and tell everyone how bad it's going to be. Get shots of people buying milk and boarding up their windows.

Then we had the obligatory images of reporters standing in the wind and the rain and shouting into the microphone to be heard over the sounds of the storm. Nothing new there. We've all seen this stuff before.

But then the storm hit, putting much of New Orleans under water, and the story changed. Dramatically.

The story became the ineptness of the Bush Administration's response to the disaster. The horrifying images coming out of New Orleans showed how badly this administration has dealt with this storm, just as it has with everything it has dealt with in the last five years. The fact is that people knew what would happen if a Category 5 storm ever hit New Orleans, and yet the Bush Administration cut funding, for example, to shore up the levees to help keep the water out of the city. They ignored the warning signs on this disaster the way they ignored the warning signs of 9/11. And when disaster struck, they were totally unprepared.

In the meantime the images coming out of New Orleans get more and more grim and horrifying as the corpses pile up in the streets, the rapes and the looting continue, and anarchy prevails in what was once a beautiful and civilized city. And the National Guard isn't there in sufficient numbers to restore order because they're all on a fool's errand in Iraq.

Are people going to finally start connecting the dots between the disaster, the inadequate response and the administration responsible for it?

You tell me.

Tom Moran