There's been a lot of coverage in the mainstream media about the government's lack of action in the wake of Katrina, including the governor of Louisiana screaming on NBC yesterday that they had seen zero federal assistance to date.

I'm not going to comment personally on this, because I don't want my anti-Administration feelings to color my response. But, I do want to call attention to something that the very conservative writer Jonah Goldberg penned in the National Review this morning. Bear in mind, that this man and this magazine have historically been unabashedly pro-Bush, pro-Iraq, pro-"Culture of life", and so on:

THE CONTINUING CRISIS [Jonah Goldberg] As I think about what the finger-pointers are likely to say in the aftermath of all this it's hard not to credit some of their complaints. For years, Democrats complained that we needed to spend more on "first-responders." I took this for what it often was: an attempt to pad municipal budgets with pork. But, one must concede it wasn't entirely about that either. And while it's likely this disaster would have presented many if not most of the challenges we're seeing this week, even if all that money had been spent as the Democrats wanted, it remains hard to dispute that it would have been better spent than much of the garbage in recent budgets. And that's the point: The choice isn't between a lean, fiscally responsible, Republican budget and a porcine Democratic budget which included money for first responders. The Republican Congress has proven to be just about as disgusting in its spending as a Democratic Congress might have been. Sure, perhaps Democrats would have spent a bit more, but Republicans are supposed to be against bloated government and the stealing of tax dollars for personal projects and missions. So whatever pennies we've hypothetically saved with Republicans, their hypocrisy and betrayal of principle more than compensates. So the question is, would the money have been better spent if the Republicans hadn't gotten their way? And, though it sickens me to say so, that is at best an open question. I have the utmost faith in the kleptocratic and dysfunctional governments of New Orleans and Louisiana to waste and steal money. But, we were supposed to be preparing --at the national level -- for a major terrorist attack for the last four years. I just don't see much evidence of that preparation.