New Orleans, you're doing a heck of a job

President Delusional visits New Orleans, and thinks fondly back on his days as a youthful wastrel -- as opposed to the dissipated, middle-aged wastrel he is now.

Commentary by Yours Truly.

President Bush made his first trip here in three months on Thursday and declared that New Orleans was "a heck of a place to bring your family" and that it had "some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun."

The Ninth Ward, five months after Hurricane Katrina. Somehow I think Bush didn't see this part of town.

Mr. Bush spent his brief visit in a meeting with political and business leaders on the edge of the Garden District, the grand neighborhood largely untouched by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and saw little devastation. He did not go into the city's hardest-hit areas or to Jackson Square, where several hundred girls from the Academy of the Sacred Heart staged a protest demanding stronger levees.

Mr. Bush's motorcade did pass some abandoned neighborhoods as it traveled on Interstate 10 into the city.

"It may be hard for you to see, but from when I first came here to today, New Orleans is reminding me of the city I used to come to visit," the president told the local leaders at the Convention and Visitors Bureau, an independent group set up to attract business and tourism to the city.

How the hell does he know? He was probably too wasted to even remember.

Mr. Bush added that "for folks around the country who are looking for a great place to have a convention, or a great place to visit, I'd suggest coming here to the great New Orleans."

Mr. Bush, who appeared to be trying to spread optimism in a city that is years away from recovery, did not tell the group or the city's residents what many were hoping to hear: that he would commit the federal government to building the strongest possible levees, a Category 5 storm protection system.

Instead, on a day when the Bush administration revised the deficit upward to more than $400 billion and blamed it largely on Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Bush restated his support for spending $3.1 billion of federal money on building "stronger and better" levees.

Local engineers say those levees would protect against the 100-mile-an-hour winds of a Category 2 hurricane and the low barometric pressure of a Category 3 or weak Category 4 storm. Hurricane Katrina peaked as a Category 5 storm in the Gulf of Mexico and hit land as a Category 3 storm.

The president ignored questions about the city's new rebuilding plan, introduced Wednesday night to enormous community criticism, and White House officials traveling with Mr. Bush declined to offer opinions. The plan, which depends on nearly $17 billion more from the federal government, gives neighborhoods in low-lying parts of the city from four months to a year to attract sufficient numbers of residents or be bulldozed.

Yet there are NO incentives for the largely black residents of the most hard-hit areas to come back -- no way for these people, many of whom have been left destitute, to come back. They just don't have the money to come back and rebuild.

This is essentially a land grab -- a land grab by the Federal government of properties that have historically belonged to black families, with an eye towards handing them over to developers for luxury condos and hotels and casinos. The government is taking advantage of the poverty of the former residents of New Orleans by setting a deadline and condition few of them can meet in order to return, just so that they can turn the city where George W. Bush used to love to come and get plastered, over to his own campaign contributors.

He should be ashamed of himself. Of course, that would require that he have a soul and even a shred of human kindness in that soul.