Terence Blanchard and the Metropole Orchestra perform Funeral Dirge.

Dan Balz has a piece in the WaPo regarding the dire straits in which the Republican party finds itself in the aftermath of the many failures of the Bush Administration.   That bitter aftertaste is the realization that we are, somehow, supposed to find pity in our aching hearts for their day late and a dollar short publicly staged ”rejection” of Bush.

Much more than Katrina explains the continuing drop in Bush’s support in the past 12 months, but there is little doubt that the hurricane crystallized negative perceptions about Bush’s performance that he never has been able to shake. And in the fallout from the Gonzales resignation on Monday, there were renewed complaints that echoed the criticism after Katrina, that the administration lacks basic competence in dealing with problems….

What worries Republicans most is that the damage inflicted by the administration now costs them as much as it does the president, which has caused Republican elected officials, presidential candidates and GOP strategists to wish for a speedy end to the administration….

It’s like finding Jesus on the courthouse steps — not altogether plausible just as judgment day is upon you, now is it? 

This isn’t just some abstract tale of political misfortune. Many in the Gulf Coast live, day in and day out, in the shadows of George Bush’s many failures.  In the aftermath of all those enabling decisions for no oversight and no accountability from the rubber stamp Republicans (and, can’t forget, no oversight Joe).  The folks in the Gulf Coast live the consequences of the Bush Administration’s inaction:

No, Ms. Cole was supposed to be paying $275 a month for a two-bedroom house in the Lower Ninth Ward — next door to her mother, across the street from her aunt, with a child care network that extended the length and breadth of her large New Orleans family. With her house destroyed and no job or savings, however, her chances of recreating that old reality are slim.

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

“We in storage,” said Ann Picard, 49, cocking her arm toward the blind white cracker box of a house she shares with Ms. Cole, her niece, and Ms. Cole’s three children. “We just in storage.”…

As of late May, however, there were still more than 30,000 families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spread across the country in apartments paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another 13,000 families, down from a peak of nearly 18,000, marooned in trailer or mobile home parks, where hunger is so prevalent that lines form when the truck from the food bank appears….

Despite their longing, some evacuees are afraid to return; they must choose between formaldehyde-laced trailers and a city they view as contaminated, poorly protected from floods and more violent than ever before….

As Douglas Brinkley said:  “Too often in the United States we forget that “inaction” can be a policy initiative.   For everyone who ever gave the Bush Administration a pass on all those broken promises and failed expectations?  Can’t just wash it away…

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