What he said:

"It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad," said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. "I'm 84 years old. I've been around a long time, but I've never seen anything like this."

And, the more things change:

"With the eye of Hugo over my City Hall, literally, I said to a FEMA official, 'What's the main bit of advice you can give me?' and he said, 'You need to make sure you're accounting for all your expenses," Mayor Riley pof Charleston, South Carolina] recalled. "The tragedy of these things is the unnecessary pain in those early days, the complete destruction of normalcy."

NYT

And can we plese end the nonsense that "complaints" equal "recriminations"? I used to work for a lawyer who liked to remind me: "They don't pay us to be wrong." He was right. The judge might disagree with our legal interpretation or the applicability of our case law or the strength of our argument, but the client wasn't paying us to screw up the law, bumble our efforts, and generally behave as if we couldn't do the job we signed up to do.

It isn't recriminations at this point: it's accountability. Consider:

-- Five days after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the northern Gulf Coast, masses of stranded people living among corpses and feces on the New Orleans riverfront received water, food and medicine.

It was the first arrival of substantial assistance since the Category 4 storm and ensuing flood waters ravaged the area.

On Thursday Michael Brown, head of FEMA, said he didn't know anyone was at this Convention Center. And yet Mr. Bush, standing in Biloxi, Mississippi yesterday, praised Mr. Brown by name for the work he had done leading FEMA in response to this crisis. As Aaron Brown said last night on NewsNight: "What planet are these people on?"

President Bush, Mr. Brown: we aren't paying you to be so completely wrong.