She actually starts okay by admitting that the Iraq War has left America thin on the ground in terms of national guard availability. But then there's a watershed sentence which marks her exit from the reality-based community: "The fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilized for disaster has saved lives".

Ignorant or dishonest? You tell me. Certainly not listening to any reports from on the ground in New Orleans.

The article continues with an argument that 9/11 changed Bush's philosophy on disaster relief by his recognizing that the response needed to be led at the federal level, and hence the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, which of course absorbed the FEMA. This is I suppose fair enough, except you should not overlook the fact that at the most senior level, OHS and FEMA are run by GOP political fixers and/or lawyers, not the kind of disaster-recovery professionals one might hope for.

The final third of the article however, is the coup de grace for a shameless Bush apologist. This piece (no doubt written for the benefit of a foreign audience) is simply astounding:

"The level of preparedness for a giant storm may not have been obvious outside the country. But the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early." [emphasis added]

The bullsh*t continues - according to Shlaes, citizens with "special needs" were ordered to go to the Superdome. And in the next sentence, she reports on the call to evacuate the city. Can she not see the total bankruptcy in morality, planning and leadership where on the one hand an evacuation is called for, but the poor and infirm get left behind?

She concludes her argument that the preparedness was adequate by saying that 30,000 troops will soon be in the affected area. Perhaps one day she'll dial 911, and when the police say they'll arrive soon, she can expect them any time in the next week.

But her final paragraph takes the biscuit. She says the Feds will start spending more on possible catastrophes (eg San Fran earthquake), which is probably quite likely, but then she pulls the oldest wingnut trick and makes a ludicrous and totally unsupportable assertion: "The odds of another natural disaster on a Katrina scale are still less than the odds of a terrorist poisoning of a water source or, heaven forfend, a dirty bomb at an airport".

The knee-jerk reaction to this is to ask - how on earth can you back that up? Of course she can't, but let's stay on offense and ask the more relevant question - why do you think this is the case?

Dealing with the dirty bomb at an airport scenario... for crying out loud, there is no credible scientific study that makes a dirty bomb attack any more deadly than, say, terrorists flying airplanes into Manhattan skyscrapers. In fact the evidence that dirty bombs any more than an outsized conventional bomb would decimate a population is non-existent.

On the poisoning of a water supply - why is this still a risk? Have Homeland Security not started dealing with this scenario? If not, why not?

And Amity's good for a kicking on this point, because she even argues that "those terror odds are currently increasing" - again, WHY? She offers up chaos as the environment in which terror thrives (yes, the chaos of New York, DC, Madrid and London was a real catalyst for terror), and concludes that "most Americans know all this and are trying to rise to the challenges this year has brought".

Amity, sweetie, Americans are beginning to question whether five years of Bush-rule has fomented chaos and uncertainty, and whether they can be trusted with running the American government. This is not politics, this is POLICY, and in what's left of American democracy, the government should always be accountable for policy decisions, regardless of the political climate.