You remember nasty Katrina.

One year ago Tuesday, she violently spiraled into the Gulf Coast, killing
more than 1,800 people, destroying 353,000 homes, doing $81 billion in
damage, drowning 80 percent of New Orleans and setting off a circus of media
hysteria, political finger-pointing, racial recrimination and myth-mongering
that embarrassed us before the whole world.

No thanks to the electronic media, the American public was left with a
distorted view of what really happened before and after Hurricane Katrina
hit.

Remember those initial shocking TV reports? New Orleans consumed by anarchy?
Rescue helicopters shot at? People by the score being raped and murdered in
the Superdome and convention center?

None of it was true. Looters were common. But violent crime was actually
rarer than usual.

How about the government's slow response time? Another myth. Within three
days, 100,000 emergency personnel arrived on the scene from state, local and
federal sources and rescued 100,000 soaked souls -- making it arguably the
largest and fastest rescue effort in U.S. history.

As for the mass evacuation that supposedly didn't work, 1.2 million of metro
New Orleans' 1.5 million people left town before Katrina hit. It took 38
hours -- 34 fewer than expected. Most who stayed behind chose not to leave.

At first the media-driven blame game was simple: President Bush and his
cronies at FEMA didn't care or respond fast enough. Later the most culpable
pols -- New Orleans Mayor Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Blanco -- were fingered.

But the real culprits were not individual politicians but government and
bureaucracy. At nearly every step and turn, it was hapless public-sector
players that either caused problems or made them worse.

The city government -- congenitally corrupt, broke and clueless -- was
ill-prepared for Katrina or became paralyzed in the clutch. Likewise the
slimy Louisiana state government, which despite decades of warnings failed
to upgrade the levees.

As for the feds, FEMA was a joke long before Katrina flooded New Orleans. So
was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has spent the last 100 years
messing up the natural flow of the Mississippi and which designed and built
the storm walls and earthen levees that failed and flooded New Orleans.

Miraculously, the Corps admitted its incompetence in June, albeit in
stereotypically bureaucratic fashion -- by issuing a 6,000-page report that
cost $19.7 million.

New Orleans, by all accounts, from Time magazine Spike Lee's HBO
documentary, is still in sad shape. Despite billions in federal aid, despite
myriad promises and plans, despite the hard work of thousands of good
people, more than 113,000 humans still live in FEMA trailers and 60 percent
of New Orleans' population lives elsewhere.

The poor city is a skeleton running on federal handouts. Its leaders are
still arguing about what neighborhoods to redevelop and how. The Army Corps
is still not done repairing the levees, which will need many years and many
more billions before they can even stand up to another relatively weak
Category 3 like the tragically well-aimed Katrina.

Meanwhile, as the public sector dithers and squabbles and plans its next
fiascoes, Mother Nature will be perennially brewing up new catastrophes that
could put wounded New Orleans under water again for good.

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