A failure of the press, the parties (local and national) and the president alike.

The most compelling news coverage I saw (from far away here in Oregon) was the live coverage on WWL TV. They threw away the local TV news rule book and covered it like journalists. Even the Times-Picayune, which certainly performed heroics, did not fully capture the enormity and the importance of this historic event.

My favorite WWL moment was the night that the two anchors took turns reading paragraphs from Anne Rice's angry lament that had just gone online at the New York Times web site. But while that offered an emotional release, the WWL coverage from the initial helicopter flyovers to the on-the-ground reporting filled in the picture far better than the national media, with their screaming headlines, self-important anchorfaces and haughty patronizing of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi ever did.

I'm particularly upset about the judgments being rendered on Mayor Ray Nagin. There are plenty of things to criticize in his political career and his performance during and after the hurricanes. But if you think about standing in his shoes for an hour, what would you do? The most disheartening moment of the entire period was also on WWL, when Nagin appeared on camera outside the Superdome the afternoon of August 30 and said the Corps of Engineers had stopped trying to fill the breach of the key levee break on the 17th St Canal and that "the bowl will be filled."

If you want a tough-minded read about the causes and possible solutions to that crucial issue, and the the hydrological quagmire of the Gulf Coast as a whole, read Ivor von Heerden's no-holds-barred "The Storm." Flawed as it is in some ways, at least it is from someone who is genuinely trying to change the situation rather than mostly make a buck off it.

In the end, though, Barra has it right. The fury of the storm -- just a Pretty Large One and not the fabled Big One that will inundate New Orleans under 25 feet of water -- caused terrible havoc.

But it took no less than three more days for the federal government after Nagin's lament on Tuesday the 30th to arrive in force in the region -- not one on the other side of the world but in the heart of our own country. The President of the United States doesn't care about the Gulf Coast, and truth be told, he really doesn't care about this nation.

Allen Barra has done a good job of intuiting what professional historians have known for a long time about Brinkley--he is a naked careerist and never bites the hands that feed him. He's far from a terrible historian, but one eye is always on the market and the other is on the powerful people he can siddle up to by saying this or that. He's very similar in this way to Thomas Friedman in the NY Times--a king of conventional wisdom and repackaging other people's ideas for resale to the power elite. In other words, they make out very well telling important people what they want to hear. I'm sure he genuinely cares about what happened during Katrina, but not enough to "piss in the fingerbowls" of those who could make him pay for being controversial in the wrong way. And he's a Presidential historian, which means he doesn't want to seriously alienate good sources for upcoming projects. That's just the way the game is played when you want to be that rarity, a celebrity academic.

Of course it's all Bush's fault! He caused Hurricane Katrina in the first place, and he personally steered it toward Nawlins, although his aim was a bit off, because if he really wanted to do some damage, he would have had the storm come ashore to the west of the city so the prevailing winds that hit the city would have been coming off the water and not the land. I have it on the word of no lesser authority on weather and climate than Bill Clinton himself!

Do you idiots realize how stupid you sound and why the moonbat left is so irrelevant to politics today--except that the fact that you caused Kerry to lose in '04 and you'll cause whoever to lose in '08, too.

Step 1: Acknowledge that George W Bush is the worst human being ever to exist

Step 2: Complain that the book in question doesn't hammer home the the fact of Step 1 hard enough

That looks pretty easy. Can I earn a few extra bucks freelancing for Salon? I want to review the new David McCullough book 1776. Don't worry; I'll find a place to bash GWB in the review. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Battle of Brooklyn was his fault, too.

Brinkley is correct that the media did a superb job in covering Katrina, that it was the media, not the Bush White House, that forged the uncreated conscience of the country.

Really? They all reported mass murders, child rapes, rampant lawlessness in the Superdome and the Convention Center. Hundreds of dead all over the Superdome and Convention Center. Didn't happen. Wasn't checked out. In fact, the FEMA and Guard response to the area was delayed so that a stock of body bags and a portable morgue could be sent in with the first wave.

Lots of shots of newscritters standing in the wind and rain. Not a lot of critical analysis, nor any conception of what response times were in previous disasters. (Check out the timelines for FEMA response to Andrew and other big storms. Right in line with Katrina.)

Down here in New Orleans, where I live, the Brinkley's book had more effect than even Allan Barra mentions. (By the way, having read the book, I agree with 90% of Barra's piece. I actually don't think he goes far enough in calling out Brinkley for writing a slipshod, error-ridden, conventional-wisdom worshipping work of cut-and-paste history.)

Anyway, Brinkley was a personal supporter of Mitch Landrieu's going back to the fall. He supported him throughout the campaign. He may have even been one of the people who helped to convince Landrieu to get in the race when Landrieu was wavering, since Brinkley moves in New Orleans's Uptown society. In short, Brinkley had more than an average person's interest in Landrieu's candidacy, and far more of an interest than ought to be permissible in an historian writing history.

Yes, the book was excerpted in Vanity Fair. But it was also excerpted in the Times-Picayune less than two weeks before the run-off. Those excerpts were the most vehement of the anti-Nagin passages, and they were widely seen as an attempt by the paper -- no fans of Nagin -- to swing the election in cooperation with Brinkley. They failed in the end, but not for lack of trying.

I did not vote for Nagin, but I also didn't appreciate Brinkley's abandonment of all pretetense of being an historian by using his work to influence the very developments he was writing about. We here in New Orleans could use a good work of history on Katrina and its aftermath, but this book isn't it. Setting aside everything I've just said, the book is also a 716-page clipping file of news that everyone here in the city already knows intimately. There are no new insights, no new connections, no moments of illumination that make the events of last fall a little more understandable. The book may still be of use to folks who have not been paying attention, but anyone who has will have to wait for a more serious book to be written.

In the meantime, any producer who thinks Brinkley is a particularly good representative for New Orleans, or has special access here in the city, is being foolish. He's an Uptowner with an Uptown sense of the city.