Katrina fatigue? Nah!

When the time comes, I won't say I told you so. I'll say Newt told you so:

``It was Katrina that broke the sense that the Republicans could govern well,'' former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview. Bush ``was still seen before Katrina as a relatively strong leader, and somewhere in this process there was a substantial erosion because Americans were shocked'' by the government's failure to perform.

And Newt's not the only Republican saying that:

``Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us,'' says a radio advertisement running this week in New Orleans. The narrator is Joe Lavigne, a Republican candidate who is seeking a House seat in November. Bush is ``spending too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his promise to rebuild New Orleans,'' the ad asserts.
....
``Republicans very much hoped to reach out to African- Americans and bring them into the Republican tent,'' said David Gergen, a government professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. ``Katrina really turned that around.''
....
``We don't have transportation, we don't have health care, there are a lot of places that still don't have electricity,'' said Roger Villere, a New Orleans florist and chairman of the state Republican Party. ``Things don't look much different than they did a year ago.''

The damage on the Gulf Coast is not gone; and it is not forgotten. New Orleans wasn't even hit by Katrina; it was flooded by an inadequate levee system. It was devastated by a completely inadequate and incompetent response. It showed us, in our own backyard, precisely what is going on in Iraq; and now Lebanon; and coming soon to a community near you. "Things don't look much different than they did a year ago" could be a phrase from scout prime as much as from a New Orleans resident. I especially like the attitude of the Rising Tide New Orleans Bloggers Conference: "Unfatigued." Yeah.

Since I don't have the chops to add music, and the MadPriest already has the best tunes, let's incorporate his music herein by reference (as the lawyers say) and go out into the world singing.

Good music ('cause Indians are rulers on the holiday!)

More good music

And just so we stay "unfatigued:" A Katrina Timeline.