Well frankly, In the past fifteen years I've dealt with earthquakes, floods, wind storms, massive wild fires, ice storms and giant landslides. I've had to tell people to evacuate their homes. I've had to wake up the Governor in the middle of the night to tell him what latest malaise threatened our state's citizens. I've had to tell people that they could never again return to the homes they lost. I've had to make certain resources were mobilized to save lives and property.

Emergency management is all about being prepared. Its about planning ahead for the inevitable from Mother Nature. Its about command and control during and following an event. Its about mobilizing resources. Its about saving lives.

I've worked with FEMA and the federal government during disasters when they were at their finest. We've now observed FEMA and the federal government at their absolute worst.

I've known you for, gee, must be going on eight years now, Don. Over the years you've revealed a lot of individual pieces of biographical information whose consistency makes me believe that you really are in the line of work you claim to be. That is, your professional experience has to outclass the amateur efforts of people like me and Tom trying to reconstruct how things should have worked during this disaster, starting from basic ignorance. We have to resort to remedial exercizes like slogging through the 400-page DHS National Response Plan, while I'll bet you've actually had to read it on the job. Share what you know with us.

You know that the partisans who've always backed Bush are already certain that Bush is entirely blameless, and so nobody's expression of opinion to the contrary will ever make a dent in that diamond-hard certainty. If I may say so, especially your opinion, because you've historically expressed a very low opinion of Bush all along. It's a bit like the fable of the little boy who cried wolf, without acknowledging how the story turned out: One day the wolf actually did show up.

However, because you have a point of view based on professional experience that ought to carry greater weight in this matter, this is your moment to shine. Give us a baseline of how the system should have worked, so that we have something against which to judge how it actually turned out.

Maybe you could look at it as an alternate history excercize. If everything had gone according to plan when Katrina hit, if everybody had done everything right, how would the story of Katrina be written up in the history books?