Like a rock or pop act that makes its audience wait till the encore
to hear the Big Hit, President Obama has made New Orleans wait till
mid- or late-October for the long-promised Presidential visit to the
Crescent City. But, hey, priorities speak louder than promises.
Two
points about The Visit: as the Sun-Herald correctly points out, the
President's visit is limited to New Orleans, leaving out a touchdown in
the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the area actually devastated by Hurricane
Katrina, as opposed to the area (N.O. and vicinity) devastated by the
failure of the federally-designed and -constructed levees and
floodwalls.
Second, the White House's press release (which
appears to not appear any more at whitehouse.gov) emphasizes the
President's commitment to the visit as a touchstone for reforming
disaster-response at federal, state and local levels. Translation:
whoever is advising Obama is, like the national media, obsessed with
the failures of Bush-era FEMA, and not at all focused on the
four-decade-long failure, under both parties, of the Army Corps of
Engineers.
But let's hear it for "Free Bird".
