What a difference four years makes.

Republicans were all geared up to commemorate the four-year anniversary of 9/11, and Katrina went and spoiled it. Because what’s the point of showing shots of valiant rescues in New York from back then when the news is full of failed rescues in Louisiana and Mississippi now?

There goes a perfectly good opportunity to pump up the faithful by blurring the line between 9/11 and Iraq, something the Bush administration desperately needs to do. Damn, I hate it when that happens.

What else is different today? Well, Rudolph Guiliani isn’t around to show Georgie how to be stoic yet heroic, for one thing. What Bush really needs to do is send Rudi on a tour of the hurricane sites. He could attend funerals, once people are able to hold them, and be in weddings, once anyone can even think of such things.

Congress isn’t joining hands and singing feelings – I mean, the national anthem – either. Instead, partisanism is at an all-time high, at one-more-degree-and-we’ll-have-civil-war highs to be exact. No one can say or do anything, no matter how noble or innocent, without being accused of playing politics. Which everyone is.

How did we get here? What’s happened to our country? The answer, to me, is four years of George Bush, Karl Rove, Donald “It’s Not Torture If We Do It” Rumsfeld, and Dickface Cheney. It’s people like Colin Powell lying then leaving anyway and being replaced by people who continue to lie but stay on. And it’s all of us who have have failed to mount an effective counter-campaign against these miserable excuses.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good. Maybe the winds of Katrina will do what four years of our logic hasn’t done. Maybe the disaster of Katrina will breathe life into the loyal opposition. But first, we gotta get those folks some help. We are still that nation that stood together four years ago. We just need to remember that.

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