Modern Republicans have left all that behind. They don’t like government; they want, in Lovable Furry Old Grover Norquist’s famous words, to shrink government to the size at which it can be drowned in the bathtub. Consequently, when they get into government, they quickly fill its halls with two kinds of people: people who are charged with the task of destroying the agencies they run, and people who have no idea whatsoever about how their agencies work. (Reagan set the template: James Watt at Interior, Clarence Thomas at the EEOC, Anne Gorsuch at EPA, among the destroyers; Samuel Pierce at HUD, among the no-idea-whatsoevers. FEMA gets the latter group.) So your modern Republicans don’t do disaster management. In fact, there’s a lot of things they don’t do anymore. Basically, they’re down to two things: one wing retools the tax code so as to redistribute wealth to their friends and cronies in the top .001 of American society, and the other wing works to expel gays and lesbians from the body politic. That’s about it.

It's a strategy we all know--given a responsibility you don't want, one way to get out of it is to fuck it up so badly no one ever asks you to do it again. Basically, the Norquistian theory that the federal government can't do anything right became a self-fulfilling prophecy. From that viewpoint, FEMA's failure to evacuate New Orleans before the hurricane and their failure to respond quickly in order to save lives afterward went pretty much according to plan--I have little doubt that the spinmeisters are working on a way right this minute to use this as leverage to make the argument that asking for help from the federal government will fail you every time, not just when a bunch of heartless incompetents are in charge.