AS the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday,
President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it,
while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a
natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn't change: it is
immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president's first priority, the one that sped him from
Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of
record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake
Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in
which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at
the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term
2.

After dispatching Katrina with a few sentences of sanctimonious boilerplate
("our hearts and prayers are with our fellow citizens"), he turned to his more
important task. The war in Iraq is World War II. George W. Bush is F.D.R. And
anyone who refuses to stay his course is soft on terrorism and guilty of a
pre-9/11 "mind-set of isolation and retreat." Yet even as Mr. Bush promised
"victory" (a word used nine times in this speech on Tuesday), he was standing at
the totemic scene of his failure. It was along this same San Diego coastline
that he declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq on the aircraft carrier Abraham
Lincoln more than two years ago.

For this return engagement, The Washington Post reported, the president's stage managers made sure he was positioned so that another hulking aircraft carrier nearby would stay off-camera, lest anyone be reminded of that premature end of "major combat operations."...

Though history is supposed to occur first as tragedy, then as farce, even
at this early stage we can see that tragedy is being repeated once more as
tragedy. From the president's administration's inattention to threats before
9/11 to his disappearing act on the day itself to the reckless blundering in the
ill-planned war of choice that was 9/11's bastard offspring, Katrina is déjà vu
with a vengeance.

The president's declaration that "I don't think anyone anticipated the
breach of the levees" has instantly achieved the notoriety of Condoleezza Rice's
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an
airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." The administration's complete
obliviousness to the possibilities for energy failures, food and water
deprivation, and civil disorder in a major city under siege needs only the
Donald Rumsfeld punch line of "Stuff happens" for a coup de grâce. How about
shared sacrifice, so that this time we might get the job done right? After Mr.
Bush's visit on "Good Morning America" on Thursday, Diane Sawyer reported on a
postinterview conversation in which he said, "There won't have to be tax
increases."

But on a second go-round, even the right isn't so easily fooled by this
drill (with the reliable exception of Peggy Noonan, who found much reassurance
in Mr. Bush's initial autopilot statement about the hurricane, with its laundry
list of tarps and blankets). This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too
familiar. They couldn't be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial
post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This
time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.

You could almost see Mr. Bush's political base starting to crumble at its
very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to
ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans
than it had been at pacifying Falluja. A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith,
covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand
grenades of harsh reality into Bill O'Reilly's usually spin-shellacked "No Spin
Zone." Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted "that the haves of this city, the
movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or
immediately after the storm." What he didn't have to say, since it was visible
to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.

In that sense, the inequality of the suffering has not only exposed the
sham of the relentless photo-ops with black schoolchildren whom the president
trots out at campaign time to sell his "compassionate conservatism"; it has also
positioned Katrina before a rapt late-summer audience as a replay of the sinking
of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers made it safely into
lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a horrifying spectacle of every man,
woman and child for himself.

THE captain in this case, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security
secretary, was so oblivious to those on the lower decks that on Thursday he
applauded the federal response to the still rampaging nightmare as "really
exceptional." He told NPR that he had "not heard a report of thousands of people
in the convention center who don't have food and water" - even though every
television viewer in the country had been hearing of those 25,000 stranded
refugees for at least a day. This Titanic syndrome, too, precisely echoes the
post-9/11 wartime history of an administration that has rewarded the haves at
home with economic goodies while leaving the have-nots to fight in Iraq without
proper support in manpower or armor. Surely it's only a matter of time before
Mr. Chertoff and the equally at sea FEMA director, Michael Brown (who also was
among the last to hear about the convention center), are each awarded a
Presidential Medal of Freedom in line with past architects of lethal
administration calamity like George Tenet and Paul Bremer.

On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped "people
don't play politics during this period of time." Presumably that means that the
photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won't be
sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he'll even
call off the right-wing attack machine so it won't Swift-boat the Katrina
survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those
New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.

But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to
intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no
business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy. Eventually we're
going to have to examine the administration's behavior before, during and after
this storm as closely as its history before, during and after 9/11. We're going
to have to ask if troops and matériel of all kinds could have arrived faster
without the drain of national resources into a quagmire. We're going to have to
ask why it took almost two days of people being without food, shelter and water
for Mr. Bush to get back to Washington.

Most of all, we're going to have to face the reality that with this
disaster, the administration has again increased our vulnerability to the
terrorists we were supposed to be fighting after 9/11. As Richard Clarke, the
former counterterrorism czar, pointed out to The Washington Post last week in
talking about the fallout from the war in Iraq, there have been twice as many
terrorist attacks outside Iraq in the three years after 9/11 than in the three
years before. Now, thanks to Mr. Bush's variously incompetent, diffident and
hubristic mismanagement of the attack by Katrina, he has sent the entire world a
simple and unambiguous message: whatever the explanation, the United States is
unable to fight its current war and protect homeland security at the same
time.