today's editorials

Folks are at their finest today on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

Frank Rich uses the administrations' consistent allusions to 9/11 to shape his criticism of the President's response to Katrina in "Falluja Floods the Superdome".

"The president's declaration that 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees' has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleeza Rice's 'I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.' The administration's complete obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water deprivation and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the Donald Rumsfeld punch line of 'Stuff happens' for a coup de grace."

David Brooks thinks that the public response to Katrina, and the growing lack of trust in public institutions, is going to result in a transformation of the current political culture. It has to, he writes, "People are as mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore." And, as far as Brooks is concerned, they are justified in their anger.

"The scrapbook of history accords but a few pages to each decade and it is already clear that the pages devoted to this one will be grisly. There will be pictures of bodies falling from the twin towers, beheaded kidnapping victims in Iraq and corpses still floating in the waterways of New Orleans five days after the disaster that caused them."