Some basic facts:

• The head of the National Guard has acknowledged that the deployment of his personnel to Iraq delayed the response to Katrina by at least a day

• Senior Bush administration personnel told the NYT that politics delayed their response

• Bush's choice to head FEMA has been relieved

• Conservative pundit/NRO Corner blogger Rod Dreher observes that "a raft of FEMA's top leaders have little or no emergency management experience, but are instead politically well connected to the GOP and the White House. This is a scandal, a real scandal. How is it possible that four years after 9/11, the president treats a federal agency vital to homeland security as a patronage prize?"