...The fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilised for disaster has saved lives.

(...)

After all, among Mr Bush's advisers were federalists who deplored the concept of expanding Washington's power. They recognised that weather emergencies, like wars, often provide the excuse for just such expansion. Faced with a Katrina in the summer of 2001, the president, thinking as a federalist, might have been slower to call for Washington's intervention. He might have said: this is a job for Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana. With a little help from Washington. And that, alas, probably would not have been sufficient.

September 11 changed Mr Bush and the country. Many of Mr Bush's critics remarked that he looked like a deer in the headlights in that moment at the primary school when aides first whispered to him the news of the aircraft hijackings. But Mr Bush grew into a new role of leader in emergencies, and so did the federal government. In addition to its old Federal Emergency Management Agency, it created the Office of Homeland Security to co-ordinate local, state and federal responses.

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. Nearly two days before Katrina hit New Orleans, the president made millions available to Louisiana by declaring the state an official disaster area. In a press conference on Sunday morning, he instructed the country to listen for any alerts - and warned straightforwardly that he could not "stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf coast communities". On Sunday too, Alabama and Mississippi received access to cash when they in turn were declared disaster areas. Citizens of New Orleans with special needs were instructed to go to the Superdome. Sunday also brought a mandatory evacuation order from the mayor of New Orleans. The hurricane made landfall only on Monday morning. And so on, in military fashion. As for troops, 30,000 will be in the south soon - hardly a shortage.

(...)

To introduce politics at such a point would be not only wrong but low.

So, not only Bush's reaction is good, but it is better than it would otherwise have been (him being a "small-government conservative") if 9/11 had not happened.

Apart from the obvious lies in the factual recitation about FEMA and homeland security, and the strange acknowledgement that Bush is no longer a "small goverment conservative" (but hey, that's still a good thing), I wonder what the point of this article is. Amity Shlaes's column is published on Mondays, so why the rush this time? Are some Bush sycophants realising that he his doing really not well and needs his image to be shored up before the perception that he fucked up totally become irremediable?

And why was the FT rushed into this? Their paper edition appears much less critical in its headlines ("Bush acts to ease Katrian crisis") than the internet version ("Hostile reception expected as Bush tours south"). Why? What's their agenda?