It’s only a week since I was expressing surprise that the BBC was burying the imminent landfall of Hurricane Katrina in its bulletins. Now, of course, we know it wasn’t just Auntie getting its priorities all wrong - so were politicians at every level in the US. The truth is, even at that point seven days ago, the disaster was already inevitable. The worst bit was that, despite the years-old warnings, the people that most needed to know didn’t.

Their incompetence means we don’t even have a real idea of a death toll; it’s rising, anyway, and the ramifications of the hurricane and floods won’t be known for a while yet, I’d guess. The political fallout, perhaps, is easier to calculate, and in today’s Sunday Times Andrew Sullivan does a good job of summing up the implications for Bush of this week’s calamity.

The key thing: yes, the Bush-haters are getting stuck in, but the scale of this ongoing disaster - and the sense at least some of it could have been prevented - appalls conservatives too, of course. Even if you believe in very little government at all, you’ve got to concede that setting in place proper precautions against disaster, and then helping helpless citizens when they’ve been struck by one, is something that can only be done by government, and thus that government should be prepared to act when most needed.

With politics thus - really - stripped from the discussion, the debate moves to address this administration’s fundamental competence - not its politics, its policies, its underlying ideology, but its competence. Writes Sullivan:

I received an e-mail from a Republican Las Vegas police officer trained in emergency management: "Some people say that you can’t hold the president responsible for this. Oh, yes you can. Because when he looked over at John Ashcroft after the jets hit the towers and said, ‘I want you to make sure this never happens again’, it was not meant to be specific to ‘no more planes hitting large buildings on the East Coast, right, boss’. It was meant that no American should have to run for his life through an American city. While Americans may perish in a senseless, unforeseen disaster, we’d save the ones we could . . . Ask yourself this: What if Al-Qaeda blew up the levees instead of the hurricane? Would the response have been any different?

Bush, in his second term, faces no fallout at the polls over his administration’s failure. But Sullivan also contends that Hillary Clinton - everyone and his dog’s tip for Democratic candidate next time - has not done enough. She’s just kept silent, hoping to simply let the anger at Bush build up. And her already poor position has been undermined by her husband who, remarkably enough, has endorsed Bush’s handling of the crisis, earning the title "Suck-up-in-chief" from Arianna Huffington. She adds:

You couldn’t get a much clearer illustration of the myriad ways that we have indeed become Two Nations than the stories and pictures coming out of New Orleans this week. Not too many Bush Pioneers were forced to wallow in their own feces at the Superdome.

But it’s mighty hard to have a teachable moment when you have Bill Clinton, still the reigning symbol of the Democratic Party, failing to connect the dots between the Bush administration’s chronic abandonment of the poor and its recent abandonment of the poor in the Big Easy — as well as the dots between the war in Iraq and the undermining of our security here at home.

[...]

Even devoted Clintonites are scratching their heads and wondering what has happened to the man once lauded as "the first black president." Is his need to be a part of this country’s wealth and power establishment so great that it blinds him to reality? Is his need to be fawned over so desperate that he has forgotten how to speak the truth?

As Sullivan notes, "a competent Democrat is an oxymoron" these days.

One man who may benefit from this, Sullivan concludes, is the man who received worldwide acclaim for his response after the last disaster to befall the US, Rudi Giuliani.

His social liberalism — which makes him anathema to the religious fundamentalists who control the Republican party — would be overwhelmed by his appeal to law-and-order Republicans. Those Republicans know when an almighty error has been made. And last week, their president failed them.

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