“After Mr. Bush’s visit on ‘Good Morning America’ on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a postinterview conversation in which he said, “There won’t have to be tax increases.” Whew, a true disaster averted.

Homeland Security chief Mike Chertoff today offered the administration’s (first, second) third excuse for their lack of preparedness for Katrina:

Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, “New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.” Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse. It was on Tuesday that the levee — may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday — that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city. I think that second catastrophe really caught everybody by surprise.

In other words, it’s not that we didn’t expect the levee system would burst. It’s that the storm passed and the levees remained in tact, and when we found out afterwards they had failed, it was already too late.

The problem: we didn’t learn that the levees were failing on “midday Tuesday.” We learned Monday morning:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on NBC’s “Today Show” there was already “significant flooding” in the city, most of which lies below sea level.

“I’ve gotten reports this morning that there’s already water coming over some of the levee systems,” he said.

On this morning’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff whether “heads will roll” after the bungled response to Katrina. Chertoff’s response:

The question I would put to people is what do you want to have us spend our time on now? Do we want to make sure we are feeding, sheltering, housing and educating those who are distressed, or do we want to begin the process of finger-pointing? I know that as far as I’m concerned I have got to be focused on, and everybody else in this government and the President has made this very clear, we have got to focus on moving forward to deal with some very real emergencies which are going to be happening in the next days and weeks.

In other words, attempts by Americans to hold their government officials accountable will somehow prevent us from “feeding, sheltering, housing and educating those who are distressed.”

You’re either with the administration or against the hurricane victims. Unreal.

The president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans, Aaron Broussard, just issued an emotional appeal on NBC’s Meet the Press. By the end, he was completely broken down, sobbing uncontrollably:

[Crooks and Liars, as always, has the video.]

RUSSERT: You just heard the director of homeland security’s explanation of what has happened this last week. What is your reaction?

BROUSSARD: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.

Broussard then discussed the difficulties local authorities had with FEMA, including one case where they actually posted armed guards to keep FEMA from cutting their communications lines: Read more