"Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."

Here's a commentary by MSNBC's Kieth Olbermann in response to a little slip-of-the-tongue by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. It is absolutely scathing and should be seen. Here's a sample:

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It goes on, and I have to say it is refreshing to see a journalist say what so many of us have been thinking for so long (and not just about the debacle on the Gulf Coast), and more eloquently than I have heard anyone offer. It's to bad his words will likely be confined to the audience of a cable news channel and the few who happen to stumble upon it on the Net.

The site linked above provides, a Quicktime video, Quicktime audio file, and written transscript.