Busheviks to New Orleans: drop dead

From the Rude Pundit:
Recreating what's been washed away is defeat, a desperate clinging to a past that Katrina wiped away. Goddamn, the Lower Ninth might have been a place of families and community and churches, but it was a poverty-stricken, forgotten corner that only surfaced in the collective consciousness of the city when there was violence. If the effort is made to keep the greedy sons of bitches away from the land there, something truly amazing can arise. But that starts with bulldozers.

The Rude Pundit left New Orleans feeling much the same about the entire area, or feeling worse - that it's time to abandon New Orleans because if next hurricane season strikes it again, it's done. For the will and energy needed to put this metropolitan area back together are too much for the state, too much for a Washington, DC too concerned with wars and corruption to look back to 2005's ravages. It's too much to ask for responsible environmental policy, and too much to ask for real attention to poverty, and too much to ask for an end to tax cuts so it can all be realistically funded, and too much to ask for a state that was started, in essence, by a pirate, Jean Lafitte, to give up its corrupt ways. It ain't gonna happen. The people here know it. It's a dulling, bludgeoning kind of knowledge, that they've been abandoned. And this crosses party lines for blame. Hell, in Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco's political career is over - she is seen as weak and ineffective. George Bush is mostly despised around here, for he is seen as a liar and opportunist whose promise of billions of dollars of aid will not be fulfilled.

There's no climax here. No solutions. Just the New Orleans night, a darkness encroaching on the last bits of light.