Some tidbits from over the weekend. Mary Landrieu is a Democrat, of course, but I don’t think she’s making this stuff up. There is this from the Times:

“I have been with Michael Brown since the minute he landed in this center,” Ms. Landrieu said Friday in Baton Rouge, referring to the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “and I have been telling him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation.”
But, she said, “I just have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the task before us.”

And this:

By Wednesday, with little visible response from the federal government, Ms. Landrieu said that she talked to FEMA officials. “I started to sense they were thinking I was a little overwrought, that maybe I was exaggerating a little bit,” she said. When she pressed Mr. Brown on when he was going to finally get buses to pick up the people who had been trapped at the Superdome, “he just mumbled,” she said.

Vitter seems to agree:

Louisiana’s other United States senator, David Vitter, called FEMA’s response completely dysfunctional, completely overwhelmed.

And this is Brown’s own account from yesterday’s Washington Post . How could anyone who watched Max Mayfield for a minute last Sunday think this was a “standard” or “typical” hurricane?

On the Friday before Katrina hit, when it was already a Category 2 hurricane rapidly gathering force in the Gulf, a veteran FEMA employee arrived at the newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm. Inside, there was surprisingly little action. “It was like nobody’s turning the key to start the engine,” the official recalled.
Brown, the agency’s director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.
“I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I’m trying to think of a better word than typical — that minimizes, any hurricane is bad — but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort,” he said. “Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you’ve seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex.”