A Friday Lament

Here's what I've been thinking:
It's been nearly two weeks since Katrina brewed itself into a hellish storm in the gulf and slammed into the coast. The first few days after the catastrophe were enough to drive anyone with half a brain and a sincere heart to their knees. The sheer magnitude of pain unleashed by the rising water displacement of hundreds of thousands of people reverberated in shockwaves and paroxysms of grief.
Time has passed, and the fetid waters have begun to slowly recede into an environmental nightmare. But the sports arena and convention center hell holes have been evacuated. While there are still corpses rotting in the streets, the living have been effectively dispatched to new lives; their stories will be told on the nightly news for days and weeks to come.
Now I am filled with a sickening apprehension. Bush is feverishly contriving to turn yet one more disaster into a political triumph, converting his stunning mismanagement and failure into political capital. A drowned city will be one more fortune for his loyal cronies. He has already reached his hands deep into our pockets and fished out a cool $50 billion. He truly despises taxpayers, we are such a pathetic and unprotected lot. Out of our measly payrolls he conjures an empire. How he abuses our generosity by using it only to enrich the already bloated. The pilfered dollar is truly the coin of the realm. If I thought for one moment that the needy would be the grateful recipients of this largesse, I would beg that he take more, but I know where that money will go. I know. How does he get away with it? Can he be stopped?
The Michael Brown story is diversion. Sure he's an incompetent idiot who shouldn't have had the power he had, but he is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. And his resume is the least of our worries. If we let stupid Brownie be the scapegoat, we will miss the real target in this disaster's crosshairs.