HO HUM, A GOVERNMENT SUCCESS STORY:

Much of the Mississippi River Valley is now underwater, and the Associated Press reports from East St. Louis, Ill., that FEMA’s performance has been exemplary . . . . Now, we’d like to see some investigative reporting into the differences between the Gulf Coast in 2005 and the Upper Midwest in ’08. We’re not prepared to accept on FEMA’s say-so that its leaders learned the lessons of Katrina and everything works now. It’s possible that Katrina was simply a harder-to-manage challenge because it was such a massive storm and because it hit an area (especially New Orleans and Louisiana) with weak social structures and poor government.

Either way, though, the claims that Bush deliberately neglected disaster preparedness have been disproved. If the Katrina-era problems have been remedied, then the Bush administration’s shortcomings were real but inadvertent. If not, then FEMA always was up to the task of an ordinary-scale disaster, and those who expected better of it in Katrina were unrealistic.

Or, possibly, things in New Orleans weren’t as bad as the media claimed at the time.