I live in the Washington area and so I was spared any direct effects of Hurricane Katrina. But like most Americans, I was moved and troubled by the events in New Orleans. Again, like most Americans, I followed the events on television as they unfolded. And, again like most Americans, I had a sense of disbelief. The first form of surprise/disbelief was about the scale and impact of the storm. Since the TV news tends to hype weather events, one tends to expect that those events will be less bad than predicted. But the larger disbelief was about the scale of governmental incompetence in the face of the tragedy. To be sure, I started out with skepticism about the competence of the Bush administration, but this went beyond what I expected. The social, cultural, economic, political impact on New Orleans remains powerful and devastating. But the national political impact is also profound--this is the moment when the press finally started to look critically at the current administration.