Predictable

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," President Bush said after, as many had anticipated, the levees were breached.

If you haven't seen it yet, Crooks & Liars has the video of Bush getting briefed before Hurricane Katrina by officials who were anticipating — and urging him to anticipate — that very thing.

This is a weird pattern with this administration. They get warned. They ignore the warning. The thing about which they were warned happens and they fail to react. Then they plead innocence because nobody could have anticipated or predicted or expected the events about which they had been warned. They did this with the exploding deficit; with "bin Laden determined to attack …"; with the insurgency in Iraq; with Hurricane Katrina.

Among the most shamefully ridiculous examples is Condoleezza Rice's post-9/11, post-Aug. 6 claim that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center."

She said this after "these people" had, themselves, suggested that very thing. More than once. And it wasn't just those people — even the trenchcoat mafia of Littleton, Colo., had dreamed of taking an airplane and slamming it into those towers.

That supposedly impossible-to-predict threat had been, in fact, discussed by New Yorkers since even before those towers were built. Here again is E.B. White, writing in 1948 of the "stubborn fact" facing all who live in New York:

The subtlest change in New York is something that people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

You've probably read how, in early 2001, FEMA listed the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country — a list that included a hurricane striking New Orleans and a terrorist attack on New York City. The third item was a massive earthquake in San Francisco.

God forbid that the Big One should hit while President Bush is still in office.

Not only would we likely see more of the same lethal incompetence, but we'd have to put up with a parade of officials — followed by a parade of conservative pundits — insisting that "no one could have anticipated" an earthquake in the Bay Area.