Did you totally miss my sarcasm or do you just love ranting? Me thinks I know the answer.
<3
Anyhow, the death toll doesn't seem to be all that high after all though it's still huge obviously. As for comparing Katrina to 9/11. I think something both disasters have in common is, that the reaction following them made things much worse than they were/should've been.
I mean, Katrina was awful and all, but if 1. The catastrophe had been better realized in an earlier stage, and 2. The people of New Orleans had reacted in a better way (obviously one cannot generalize an entire city, but nevertheless all the looting, shooting and 100x more disgusting stuff like rape is shocking in a city that is part of the supposedly 'civilized West'. Same for 9/11, it was horrible by itself obviously. But Bush' reaction did not really make matters any better; Afghanistan was somewhat justified but I dun think we need to start a discussion on Iraq all over again. (And yes 9/11 did give Bush the momentum to start that, and he has used it as a reason for the war on more than one occasion. And that's not even considering all the indirect implications/images invoked.) Suffice to say that whilst the reaction following 9/11 did so much more damage, materially, in massive loss of life in Iraq (mostly Iraqis but a lot of US and British troops as well), and obviously the image of the US and the entire West for that matter. Ah well, I'm not really looking to start yet another discussion on that, this thread was originally about Katrina after all.
"We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice."