Mission accomplished Mr. President

In the chaos and trauma that accompanied the levee collapses in New Orleans in 2005, a few basic facts were obscured:

• Katrina was not a natural disaster. It was an engineering disaster caused by the federally funded U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
• Far from performing incompetently, the Bush administration and reactionary forces in local government were extremely effective in attaining their aims.

Specifically:

1. The Bush administration did an extremely effective job of withholding vital "life and death" information that levees had not only topped, they had also catastrophically collapsed.
2. FEMA did an extremely effective job of discouraging qualified relief workers from coming to the area, going so far as to turn many back at gunpoint. They also turned away much needed supplies like water and fuel and sabotaged local communications lines.
3. Thousands of flood victims were very effectively herded and held in concentration-like conditions within the city for many days after the flooding.
4. Though it claimed to be unable to bring food, water, medicine or transportation into the flood zone, Homeland Security did an extremely effective job of quickly hiring and deploying highly paid gun thugs to the region who were employed by companies that had made massive contributions to the Bush campaign.
5. The Bush administration and their friends in the news media did an extremely effective job of painting the victims of the flooding as dangerous and not worthy of being helped.
6. The Bush administration did an extremely effective job of erasing a carefully researched and thought out evacuation plan developed over many years by LSU and replacing it with NOTHING.
7. Post-flood law enforcement did an extremely effective job of illegally seizing fire arms from hundreds of law abiding citizens while allowing criminals to run amok.

Incompetence? Poor planning?

You've got to be kidding....

The Bush administration wanted to destroy the black Democratic voting block in New Orleans - and it did. New Orleans and southern Louisiana, one of the last Democratic hold outs in the South, is Republican now.

It wanted a justification for seizing guns and declaring martial law and succeeded in creating conditions where people would beg for military intervention.

It wanted practice holding large numbers of civilians in concentration camp-like conditions - and it got the opportunity.

It wanted to obscure the fact that instead of using the tax dollars it's collected over the decades to repair and maintain levees, it's used the money to engage in illegal foreign wars.

Mission accomplished on every score.

But they made one miscalculation.

So conditioned were administration planners by their own habitual depravity, it never occurred to them that the rest of the country would object to seeing their fellow citizens suffer so outrageously at the hands of the government.

The good news is the moral instincts of Americans still function well. The bad news is their ability to see what is being done to them in broad daylight is highly impaired.

One more piece of the puzzle and another well executed part of the plan: