As sad as this is, it's an excellent propaganda opportunity for Democrats, if they grab it.

The Republican congress forces Great American City to go begging the world for cash...

Somewhere in there is an attack ad waiting to be produced.

A few years ago I might have been surprised by this but not now.  If anyone is surprised that rebuilding an old city populated by minorities is a low priority for this administration they are either naive or blissfully uninformed.  

Further, New Orleans is known for Jazz and it's French/Creole heritage and those two things tend to be more popular in old Europe than suburban America. That's not to say that people in suburbian America are bad, just that Jazz and perhaps even New Orleans itself, are more popular in Paris, France than Paris, Texas.  New Orleans is in a fight for survival and they need help whereever they can get it.  I hope they get plenty from Japan, Europe and anywhere else.  Sad, perhaps.  Reality is often sad.

Sorry, Democrats don't do that anymore. It might offend someone.

Does anyone else see the irony in this playing out on the day when Bush talks about non-violence at Coretta Scott King's funeral?

New Orleans should be one of the few cities that suburbanites would want to take care of.  After all, tens of millions of Americans have visited New Orleans and nearly everybody enjoys it.  Maybe it is a guilty pleasure, like Las Vegas and the fundies are punishing the city for what they loved.

In any case, we have gone back to the pre civil war mentality where the United States is not one nation that takes care of its own but a collection of states where each is on its own.  This is not a good thing for the poorer red states but then education is not one of their priorities.  Maybe they have been too busy instilling "values" to learn a little simple economics.

Yet another teachable moment in American politics.

You think to yourself, Surely they can't leave New Orleans as it is? And you come back six months - or six years - later and find, Oh yes, they can.

(I naively thought something similar about the effectiveness of the Swifties' crock...)

With the camera-friendly tsunami-style wreckage in situ and the 3,000-odd missing, you'd have thought some folks in a position to make serious sustained noise - pols or media outlets - would have been sufficiently juiced up to do so.

But no. Because the fubar on the Gulf Coast is a state, rather than an event, it fails to goose the MSM. And our friends in the Dem leadership?

I don't know. But I suspect that someone has decided that being associated too closely with lobbying for action on the Katrina clearup is not good for business. It's a downer; distracts from the Dem 06 message (whatever that turns out to be); clearly doesn't excite interest from the voters.

The 1930s gave us the New Deal; the 1960s, the Great Society. From one of the ripest pair of crooked, conniving sons of bitches in the annals of American politics. In the millennium, the party's slogan seems to be: Brother, You're On Your Own.

(Perhaps they're afraid of being cast as Big Government Democrats? It's no bigger stretch than the Swifties's job on Kerry. On balance, I reckon the Dems should be afraid. Better not say anything. Don't have to say anything. Wouldn't do any good anyway. Just tiptoe away...)

Might be nice if we had an opposition party that would say something about this.