Is this the end of empire?

Washington

What did Katrina tell us? Much we already knew. Our politics is as poisoned as in the Nixon era. Even the worst disasters are exploited to score on one's enemy.

Where September 11 united us, Katrina divides us anew. No sooner had she made landfall than Robert Kennedy Jr was accusing the beleaguered Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour of moral complicity in the disaster--for having opposed the Kyoto Protocol.

As it became apparent that African-Americans, two thirds of New Orleans's population and almost all its poor, had stayed behind or been left behind, the race card was played. Bush was indifferent, it was said, because those suffering most were black. But when the looters and rapists turned out to be black, and the army and National Guard and aid workers rescuing the victims turned out to be white, the race-baiters got a deserved hiding from the radio Right.

The anti-war movement seized on the 7,000 Guard troops from Louisiana and Mississippi in Iraq. Were these soldiers not in the Persian Gulf taking …