His frequent public pronouncements notwithstanding, [FEMA Director Michael] Brown clearly saw himself in a supporting role in the disaster drama. He issued a directive to FEMA employees Monday not to respond to hurricane-ravaged areas "without being requested and lawfully dispatched by state and local authorities."

The directive revealed an allegiance to bureaucratic processes that proved maddening to some as FEMA demanded written requests for food, troops and fuel. A Florida congressman said the agency turned down an offer for flat-bottomed air boats because it didn't want to sign a contract with the supplier.

Save for the Coast Guard's dramatic air rescues, a detached, legalistic approach set the tone for the federal government's response. Brown is a lawyer as is his boss, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. And the founding document of U.S. disaster planning reads like a legal brief.

The National Response Plan is chock full of legalese, case law and statutes, but it doesn't clearly spell out something as basic as who is responsible for getting food and water to flood victims. The 426-page plan was supposed to have remedied the command-and-control problems that plagued the response to the terrorist attacks in New York City. But it's hardly a model of clarity. Its authors thought it necessary to attach an 11-page glossary of "key terms" and a three-page explanation of acronyms. On the seminal question - Who's in charge? - the Federal Response Plan is murky.

It says incidents are "typically" managed at the lowest levels of government. On the same page, however, it says that "Incidents of National Significance" put the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in charge. The next page seems to reverse course again. It says that "Incidents of National Significance," emergencies declared by the president, puts the federal government in a supporting role to protect state sovereignty. That is, unless the president decides he wants to be in charge, in which case the governor is secondary. Under those circumstances, the plan says, the president will consult with the governor, "if practicable."

So, again, this is what you get when people who don't trust the national government try to make local authorities take on more of a burden than they're able to bear in a time of crisis. It' the direct opposite of the nanny state: the stern father state, making you do things for your own good, because it will make a man out of you.

There's a fetishistic aspect to the way they respond to things, evident still in their nascent plans to use New Orleans as a proving ground for every conservative social engineering program that's ever emanated from the Heritage Foundation. They're the proverbial men with hammers, to whom everything looks like a nail.

Addenda (2:00pm): Maureen Dowd has the skinny on the lengths the White House production team went to make Bush look good for his speech in New Orleans.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn't it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

The slick White House TV production team was trying to salvage W.'s "High Noon" snap with some snazzy Hollywood-style lighting [...] As Elisabeth Bumiller, the White House reporter for The Times, noted in a pool report, the image wizards had put up a large swath of military camouflage netting, held in place by bags of rocks and strung on poles, to hide the president from the deserted and desolate streets of the French Quarter ghost town.

From Singin' in the Rain:

PR Guy: The studio's gotta keep their stars from looking ridiculous at any cost.

Cosmo Brown: Nobody's got that much money.

Unfortunately, these guys have all the money in the world.

[More Katrina posts]