A friend of mine wrote to ask if anyone was talking about the direct correlation between the money the war in Iraq is costing and the lack of preparedness that left New Orleans so devastated by Hurricane Katrina. I said yes indeed, and pointed her toward a column by Sidney Blumenthal that made just that point. She said that the man in the photo was swimming in as much oil as water and that the environmental impact of the disaster would be a long time in assessing.

Here’s hoping that editorials such as Blumenthal’s will be but the first in a drumbeat of criticism for a president who seems so hopelessly out of touch with life as lived by so much of the rest of the country — the living, dying, suffering that is the lot of those who lost everything in NO, not to mention the parents who lost their sons in Iraq — as to appear psychotic. Did you see his speech yesterday? Flipping through a hastily prepared reamarks like a senior citizen cruising through the menu at Denny’s in search of the dessert page, Bush seemed utterly disconnected from the words he was reading, the implications of loss that the sandbags and soldiers he was promising implied. Small matter that said sandbags and soldiers have yet to arrive. Bush couldn’t wait to get to the part where he gets to smile. Now, back to the ranch.

Bush’s insensitivity may yet be his undoing. His can-do response to what is shaping up to be a national crisis on a scale with 9.11 will only look more and more inane as the hellish conditions on the ground — sorry, water — in NO reach Hieronymous Bosch proportions. In “Lousiana,” his song about that state’s last great flood of 1927, Randy Newman sang

President Coolidge came down on a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President Coolidge said, Little fat man, isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?

Coolidge, who oversaw the boom in the economy that fueled the Roaring Twenties, famously decided not to run before the stock market crashed and Hoover (and the rest of the nation) reaped the whirlwind during the Great Depression. Elected to a second term, Bush may not be so lucky. If the negative repercussions of Katrina combine with growing impatience over our involvement in Iraq, 2005 may yet provide the perfect storm that could cripple his foundering presidency.