If you look on Sean Hannity's website, he declares that the Democrats
used Katrina for political gain. I wonder why, if he's so honest,
doesn't he talk about this:

The Presidency Shines (for Twenty-Six Minutes)
By Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch

Sunday 18 September 2005

Don't say they can't. They can - and they did. Despite every
calumny, it turns out that the Bush administration can put together an
effective, well-coordinated rescue team and get crucial supplies to
militarily occupied, devastated New Orleans on demand, in time, and
just where they are most needed. Last Thursday, in a spectacular rescue
operation, the administration team delivered just such supplies without
a hitch to one of the city's neediest visitors, who had been trapped in
hell-hole surroundings for almost three weeks by Hurricane Katrina. I'm
speaking, of course, of George W. Bush.

That night, he gave his 26-minute "FDR" speech in a blue work shirt
(meant assumedly to catch something of the White House work ethic) in
floodlit Jackson Square, whose brilliantly lit cathedral had the look
of Versailles amid a son-et-lumi=E8re spectacle. It was - however
briefly - a triumph of the White House rescue team, headed, naturally,
by Karl Rove, and seconded by the evangelical Christian, first-term
speechwriter, Michael Gerson (once upon a pre-steroidal time known in
the press as "the Mark McGwire of speechwriting"). He was brought back
from White House domestic advisor-hood to shove a passel of religious
imagery and Iraq-War-style catch phrases into the gaping hole Katrina
had punched in the administration's political levees. Add to those two
the White House's chief lighting designer, former NBC cameraman Bob
DeServi, and the man long in charge of "visuals," former ABC producer
Scott Sforza. The key designer of the quarter-million dollar stage set
that, during the invasion of Iraq, passed for the United States Central
Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, Sforza had with DeServi
helped produce the infamous Top-Gun-style, color-coordinated
Presidential landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln
("Mission Accomplished!") on May 1, 2003. Both men went to Jackson
Square, according to New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth
Bumiller (in a pre-speech press-pool report from New Orleans) to handle
"last minute details of the stagecraft," including the "warm tungsten
lighting" that was to give the President his empathetic - or, depending
on how you look at the man, his sci-fi - glow in that utterly deserted
setting.

As for those crucial supplies: Without a single mishap, the rescue
team delivered to central New Orleans its own generators, lights (not
just the warm-glow ones for the President but the HMI movie lights to
set the cathedral in the background ablaze), the camouflage netting
that was needed to hide from viewers any sign of the surrounding
devastation, and even its own communications equipment. And then there
was the matter of crowd control - okay, maybe not exactly crowds in
depopulated New Orleans, but soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were
effectively deployed, just in case, "to keep regular citizens several
blocks back."

Even more impressively, as NBC news anchor Bryan Williams reported
at his blog, they managed to get the lights turned on along the
President's route into Jackson Square "no more than 30 minutes before
POTUS drove through," so that looted mini-malls and abandoned gas pumps
leapt into sight. Of course, an hour after he was done and gone -
rescues of this sort being limited affairs - the area was "plunged into
total darkness again, to audible groans." (As Williams concluded, "It's
enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to
certain conclusions.")

It may be true that, for a week or more, this administration
couldn't get a bottle of water to a diabetic grandmother, but when
something was actually at stake - what reporters far and wide referred
to as the "rebuilding" not of New Orleans but of a presidency, or
simply of the presidential "image" - efficiency, coordination, and
togetherness were the by-words of the day.

As for the speech, there were some genuine can-do steps forward in
it as well. Though many in the media focused on the major financial
commitments the President seemed to make to the New Orleans area and
Katrina evacuees, more striking was his progress in accepting
"responsibility" for administration error. When he first stunned
reporters on September 13th by speaking such words while standing side
by side with the Iraqi president at a White House welcoming ceremony
("...to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job
right, I take responsibility."), he seemed a good deal less than
comfortable. In fact, despite that wonderful little "to-the-extent"
loophole phrase, he looked, as a Western pal of mine commented, like he
had just swallowed a grasshopper and was feeling the legs go down. In
New Orleans, similar words slipped down more like a smooth shot of
single-malt scotch as did that toll-free number for those needing help
(which has evidently hardly worked ever since), not to speak of all
sorts of hardly noticed charmers right out of the Bush administration's
non-Katrina wish-book. Take, for instance, this reminder that we are
ever less a civilian society capable of saving ourselves in a civil
fashion: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires
greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces - the
institution of our government most capable of massive logistical
operations on a moment's notice."

While the administration was pumping up the military and offering
up its can-do creds, on channel after channel reporters, anchors,
pundits were set back on their heels. FDR comparisons poured out,
corners were provisionally turned, hope was expressed, and the
President's strange New Orleans bubble world and bubble words were
treated as if none of the anchors and reporters had, for the previous
weeks, been there, done that. For at least the blink of a media eye,
the wrecked Super Dome, the toxic sludge only blocks away, the
devastation right beyond TV sightlines, the staggering inability to
deliver the goods, the unnecessary deaths, all seemed to evaporate in
the glare of those White House lights. For a blinding moment, the media
culture of deference we've lived with for the last four years was again
upon us at something close to full throttle.

No one should be surprised. This, after all, is where the Bush
administration first came into its own on a pile of rubble at Ground
Zero in New York City. Overgrown boys who had experienced the childhood
thrills and chills of war and adventure American-style in the dark and
on-screen, they promptly put those unforgettable Hollywood memories to
work. Through their President, they declared a fantasy war on terror
and then, with the help of the "embedded" media, proceeded to create
fabulously thrilling scenes of triumph, which they insisted were all
the reality there was around. Think of that Centcom media set in Doha,
or the now almost-forgotten Jessica Lynch "rescue," or that landing on
the aircraft carrier, or the Bush Thanksgiving turkey dinner in "Iraq,"
or almost any campaign event where the President "conversed" with
adoring, well-vetted "people," or all those years of carefully framed
photo ops of our "resolute" President in military-style togs of every
sort. It was nothing short of a way of life (as well as a way of
politics) while it lasted. Now that reality has reared up and bit them
on the butt for all to see - it may increasingly look, even to many of
those who once supported the President, like a mad way of life (and
politics) as well.

After all, imagine - at whatever the cost was - moving the
President of the United States with his own lights, generators, and
camouflaging into the very heart of a distressed city; making a tiny
slice of it look almost as good as new; and then leaving without having
done a thing for a soul. As they used to say in my childhood - about
drawings in which five-legged cows floated through clouds - what's
wrong with this picture?

Of course, Gerson's speech was only a speech. The lights did go out
again fast and the President, visibly tired, his shirt blotched with
sweat, boarded Air Force One, leaving behind actual life in all its
grimness to proceed as usual - with the administration pushing to allow
the EPA to lift environmental regulations in toxic New Orleans and in
other areas as well; with FEMA, having botched its rescue effort, now
stumbling in its aid effort; with no-bid, cost-plus rebuilding
contracts continuing to flow out to Halliburton's KBR and other
Bush-allied companies that have such a lovely record in the field of
Iraqi "reconstruction" while - here's a surprise - small or local firms
are essentially being locked out of the rebuilding effort... ho-hum.

If this is the new, conservative FDR, then - take my word for it -
Karl Rove has shuffled a very familiar deck and the latest "New Deal"
is being dealt from the bottom. If you think otherwise, and you happen
to belong to a large media organization, do I have a bridge in Brooklyn
to sell you - or do I mean a city somewhere in the southeastern U.S?

As it happens, though, Bush's special-effects men are no longer the
only ones wheeling up those Hollywood lights. What about when someone
flicks on the light switch for the natural gas - and so, home-heating -
price spike this winter; or for the next set of disasters in ever more
chaotic and disheveled Iraq; or just as the American casualty count
there passes 2,000, or exactly when the next high-powered hurricane
blows in off the Gulf (hardly inconceivable given that, over the last
35 years, according to Science magazine, there's been an 80% increase
globally in the most powerful tropical storms); or while the first
Saudi oil well or Caspian pipeline is going up in flames from a
terrorist attack and so sending oil traders' fears sky-high and the
price of crude through the roof; or when post-Katrina unemployment
figures start to sink in; or when Congress actually has to figure out
where all the money for Iraq and Katrina damage is going to come from;
or just when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald decides to lower the
boom on an administration Plame-outer or two; or... well, just add to
the list yourself. Because here's the thing: As the polls show, Katrina
finally breached the President's base of support, and no bubble speech
or day of prayer is likely to reverse that for long.

In low-lying Washington, the Bush White House, to the surprise of
most, already seems to be slowly sinking. Water is seeping into the
basement. The FEMA teams are squabbling. I wouldn't expect those rescue
squads, not even the Navy Seals, to hit the West Wing any time soon.

I only hope the generators work