“It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended “Spamalot” before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

“When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

“When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans – most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first – they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

“Who are we if we can’t take care of our own?”

— Maureen Dowd

“I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they are looting if you see a white family it says they are looking for food. And you know that it’s been five days because most of the people are black and even for me to complain … I would be a hypocrite because I would turn away from the TV because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before giving a donation and so right now I’m calling my business manager what is the biggest amount I can give.

“And just to imagine if I was down there, those are my people down there. So anybody out there who wants to help with the set up, the way that America is set up to help … The poor, the black people, the less well off as slow as possible. I mean, Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war now fighting another way and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.”

“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

— Kanye West, speaking extemporaneously last night during the NBC telethon – A Concert for Hurricane Relief. In the West Coast replay of the show, NBC reportedly censored out the last statement – “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) tried to distance himself from his published statements that the ruined city of New Orleans should be “bulldozed,” now saying he supports rebuilding the city its levees are repaired:

Hastert was still reeling from reaction to his comments earlier this week about the storm-ravaged city. “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” he said in an interview with the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill. Asked whether it made sense to spend billions of dollars rebuilding a city that lies below sea level, he told the paper, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Hastert later issued a statement saying he was not “advocating that the city be abandoned or relocated.” But Louisiana Democrats were incensed. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco demanded an apology. “To kick us when we’re down and destroy hope, when hope is the only thing we have left,” she said, “is absolutely unthinkable for a leader in his position.”

Hastert also found himself making excuses for not showing up in Washington to shepherd a bill through the House of Representatives that provided $10.5 billion in disaster relief for hurricane victims. Instead, he attended a campaign fundraising event for a colleague and a charity event, which he said benefited disaster relief efforts.

There’s no word on whether the Republican House Speaker also went shoe shopping or played golf while thousands of Americans were sick and dying in the streets.

“I want to go after the oil companies and the oil speculators and the manipulators of the money, because they’re the ones who I think are really behind this. You have a hurricane, and all of a sudden you see prices going up like that. That has . . . everything to do with people trying to make money off the backs of this tragedy.”

— Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), speaking in Elmira Heights, NY, on Thursday

The Bush Administration’s handling of disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has been so inept that even Republicans are now criticizing their Dear Leader:

• “It’s impossible to defend something like this happening in America,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “If we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?”
• “We intend to demand answers as to how this immense failure occurred, but our immediate focus must and will be on what Congress can do to help the rescue and emergency operations that are ongoing. It is also our responsibility to investigate the lack of preparedness and inadequate response to this terrible storm. [It is] increasingly clear that serious shortcomings in preparedness and response have hampered relief efforts at a critical time,” said Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, in a statement with the ranking member, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat and Crypto-Republican from Connecticut.
• “No one can be happy with the kind of response which we’ve seen in New Orleans,” said Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, also characterizing the sluggish mobilization as an “embarassment.”
• Closeted gay GOP Rep. Mark Foley of Florida called upon Bush to recall National Guardsmen stationed in Iraq whose homes and families were in the path of Katrina’s destruction.
• Republican senator from Louisiana David Vitter, speaking to reporters at the emergency response center in Baton Rouge, said he gave the federal government a grade “F” for its response to the disaster so far.
• “What it reminded me of the other day is ‘Baghdad Bob’ saying there are no Americans at the airport,” said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant in Washington. He was referring to Saddam Hussein’s reality-challenged minister of information who denied the existence of U.S. troops in the Iraqi capital. (After top Bush administration officials congratulated each other for jobs well done and spoke of water, food and troops pouring into the ravaged city when television pictures told a different story.)

There will undoubtedly be more criticism from the president’s party as the death toll from Katrina mounts – Senator Vitter predicted that there were 10,000 dead in the wake of the storm. – and the number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq continues to rise.

And then there’s the price of gas – going up, up, up…

This just in:

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.

KBR was assigned the work under a “construction capabilities” contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers’ effort to repair New Orleans’ levees.

Craig Crawford:

Before we buy the claims of politicians that there was no way to predict or prevent the sinking of New Orleans, it’s worth asking how Mr. Bill knew? That’s right, the hapless clay figure once featured on NBC’s Saturday Night Live starred in a prophetic public service announcement earlier this year to raise awareness about the environmental conditions that could lead to a hurricane drowning the city.

Go HERE to see the video.