Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

A systematic failure

Tony Blankley:

Putting aside, for the moment only, which individuals are guilty of malfeasance in office, it is undeniable that the system America established for disaster relief failed miserably last week — and thousands of Americans died because of it.
In varying degrees, the responsibility for the calamity runs from the president of the United States, to state and local officials, to bureaucrats, to individual citizens of the Gulf who were able to but didn't evacuate, to current and prior presidents and Congresses who failed to fund projects, to the media prior to the event which failed to adequately chastize politicians and inform the public of the coming danger.
While officials high and low must — and will — be held accountable for their share of the fault, the big lesson learned is that the American system with all its wealth, capacity, checks and balances and vigorous free speech failed to avoid the disaster.
Many individuals shouted loudly, in advance (sometimes for years), about the coming danger, but one can distill the failure of America's overall, collective failure to a number of misjudgments.
Collectively,the country: (1) failed to listen to credible warnings; (2) assumed that our good luck would continue unabated; (3) failed to adequately assess the magnitude and likelihood of the danger; and (4) permitted the compelling pressures and benefits of business as usual to drive from its mind a serious consideration of a radical , bad change from the status quo.
In short, we were complacent....
Many commentators, and members of the public, have quickly noted that if emergency services are so rotten for a hurricane or flood, what does this say about our preparations for terrorist attacks in the future. They rightly ask what has the federal government been doing these last four years since September 11.

The problem with this analogy to terrorist threats is that terrorist do not have the capacity to inflict the kind of damage Katrina did. Only in their wildest fantasies would they even think they could pull off a job this big. At this point the terrorist have been reduced to human bomb attacks that are naturally limited in time and scope. Panic by Shia pilgrims in Iraq killed more people than any terrorist bomb has killed since 9-11.

What the cleanup from Katrina has shownis that the reorganization push by Joe Leiberman and the Democrats after 9-11 made the response less effective, not more. While the Democrat playbook does not permit them to ever accept responsiblity for bad policy decisions, which was in this case adopted by the Bush administration, the next play in their playbook requires blaming others for the failure. They got an early start at the state and local level with that play, and people only just now becoming aware of how the state and local failures cascaded into initial unpreparedness on the part of federal officials to deal with that failure.

One thing you can take to the bank. Democrats will never accept responsibility or admit error.