Almost unnoticed by the media, apparently, has been the ludicrously poor governmental response to the latest hurricane. Jeb Bush's leap for responsibility was a laudable example of brotherly love, but hardly an explanation of why FEMA, with Brown still on the payroll, still is the gang that can't respond straightforwardly to wind or waves. The current Administration is wildly successful in wealth transfers, but can't seem to award a low bid contract, armor up our military vehicles, freeze ice, keep electricity humming, or look for Osama in the country in which he is located. If in fact Washington's latest remix of High Noon produces a White House cleaning, one positive outcome could be the recruitment to high posts of folks who know how to run a government for practical, and not merely political, purposes.

I thought at the time of Katrina that FEMA's pathetic response at that time put the Bush administration in a no-win situation. If they responded well to a subsequent hurricane somewhere else -- such as in Florida, for instance -- it would be taken as proof that the response to Katrina was deliberately underwhelming because of the race and political orientation of many of the people affected by it. If, on the other hand, Bush's FEMA didn't do a good job on another storm, it would be taken as proof that they're just incompetent.

Well, no one deserves a no-win dilemma more than Bush and his deeply incompetent administration, so I'm not particularly unhappy at the unfairness of it all. The poor response to Wilma (still orders of magnitude better than the anemic response to Katrina) is just another example of a basic fact: it's hard to make government work when you don't believe in the efficacy of government, and your ideology is built around that supposition.

I never really bought into the argument that the FEMA Katrina fiasco was linked to race (although Louisiana's blue-stateness may have lessened any sense of urgency FEMA's minders might have had about stepping in, all policies in Bush's White House being measured by political yardsticks a la Rove), since it seemed apparent from FEMA's statements at the time, and earlier in Congressional hearings, that they just didn't believe in using the Federal government to fix problems -- that was the responsibility of the states and cities. That orientation fundamentally perverted their view of what their job was, which was why they did such a bad job, and (apparently) continue to do so.

The bottom line is that we desperately need someone in the White House who believes in using governmental power to solve problems. Until we do, there will be more Katrinas, more Wilmas and more general incompetence.