No, this is the story of the hurricane: for too many pundits, left and right, Katrina was just another front in the culture war.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Hurricane Katrina - Column

Last year's devastating tsunami provoked a lot of soul searching about the ways of God to man. Hurricane Katrina, by contrast, didn't spark much religious or metaphysical discussion, aside from a few folks on the loony right who thought the hurricane was a form of divine retribution. Instead, the commentariat turned its attention to human culprits: Bush, local authorities, American racism, the shiftless poor, big government, small government, Ronald Reagan. Somewhere, someone probably pinned the blame on Martha Stewart.

To an extent, that's understandable. In Katrina's wake, public officials at all levels flailed about in an embarrassing display of ineptitude and evasion, spinning while New Orleans drowned. The disaster became a shameful spectacle most of us never thought we'd see in the United States: dead bodies in the streets, huddled masses trapped in fetid shelters with no food or water. It is also true that Katrina's devastation exposed to a harsh daylight the often ignored problems of the black underclass. But it was easy to miss the valid points in all the political sniping.

On the left, criticism of Bush turned into an orgy of schadenfreude. Michael Moore's gloating open letter to the president, tided "Vacation is Over," set the tone. "It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty," he wrote, "or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport."

Bush did make himself a convenient target. As if the revelations of cronyism and incompetence at the Federal Emergency Management Agency weren't enough, he had to utter lines straight out of some nasty comedy skit intended to portray him as the president of rich white men (most infamously, his comment that he was "looking forward to sitting on the porch" of Sen. Trent Lott's house once again after the Gulf Coast arises from the rubble).

But many of the charges against Bush ranged from shaky to downright absurd. Critics implied that Bush hadn't just overseen a shoddy response to the disaster; he had all but caused it in the first place, by diverting National Guard troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, by generally being a proponent of small government (as if), and by failing to curb hurricane-producing global warming.

Yes, overseas operations have left the National Guard overextended. But commanders insist that their resources are more than adequate to cope with disaster response, and...