Douglas Brinkley’s article on rebuilding New Orleans in the Washington Post today fires me up. Here are some excerpts:

Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city’s long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn’t President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government’s participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers’ altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They’ve been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can’t be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I’ve concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.
…
The answer to New Orleans’s levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower. Common sense dictates that the endangered areas — if repopulated (and that is a big if) — demand levees that can sustain Category 5 storms. It’s a national obligation. Entire blocks are moldering away while the federal government lifts only a cursory hand to reverse the desultory trend.

I’m sorry, but rebuilding New Orleans isn’t a “national obligation.” The state of Louisiana might make it an obligation or the city of New Orleans might make it an obligation, but the nation has not obligation to rebuilding parts of the city that are below sea level in a hurricane prone area. That’s crazy talk. Of course, soon after the hurricane President Bush talked crazy talk about the federal government rebuilding, but that was crazy talk too. Did I mention that it would cost $40 billion to build levees that would withstand a Category 5 hurricane?

Let’s be clear, it is not the role of the federal government to fix every problem, real (as in New Orleans) or merely perceived.