Katrina's Lessons

America's top talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday that the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the fingerpointing that has ensued offers the nation some profound lessons. Rush Limbaugh"What we've seen in New Orleans is first and foremost the utter failure of generation after generation after generation of the entitlement mentality," Limbaugh began at the top of his show. Flood victims had been doubly victimized by the perception that government would somehow save them from nature's rage, he said. "They had no idea what to do because they've been told somebody else was going to fix it." After fostering dependency among the citizens of New Orleans, Limbaugh said state and local officials failed to respond to the dependency they helped create. "You've all seen the pictures of the school buses and the municipal buses that are flooded and ruined," he noted, referring to widely circulated photos of buses that sat idle throughout the storm just a mile away from the Superdome. "We know there was an utter failure to execute an evacuation plan that was long in place," he said, before charging: "We're looking here at utter incompetence - total incompetence from the mayor of New Orleans and the Gov. of Louisiana." "[The flood victims] were told to go to the Superdome but even then they had to walk to the Superdome" as the storm battered the city. "And they had to bring their own food and water to the Superdome," he noted The top talker didn't spare federal officials, saying that another lesson of Katrina is that "large bureaucracies that grow ever larger by the year cannot handle circumstances like this." "We have also learned that the utter failure of large bureaucracies only begets hearings by those bureaucracies which will serve really one purpose: And that is to give themselves excuses and reasons to further enlarge those bureaucracies - which will only compound our problem." Only one government bureaucracy functioned well under the stress of the Katrina crisis, Limbaugh said: the U.S. military.