The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that SHOULD LEAD to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.

When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.

When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is REPEATEDLY CUT by an administration that seems determined to UNDERMINE the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could NOT survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.

When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.

When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.

When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at the New Orleans convention center -- where people died and were starving -- and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they should be FIRED, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael Brown in New Orleans last week.

When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.

When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given his walking papers.

When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity that should banish him from office.

When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their own misjudgments.

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.

NEWS ORGANIZATIONS are usually uneasy about showing images of the dead, as a matter of both taste and respect. But it's a decision for individual newspapers and television stations to make. When the government attempts to play the deciding role -- as the Federal Emergency Management Agency did yesterday when it began trying to prevent photographing of the dead in New Orleans -- it smacks not of concern for the feelings of survivors or the sensibility of readers, but of a desire to cover up the bad news.

Is there an echo here? For more than a year, the Bush administration prevented the press from showing the return of soldiers' coffins from Iraq. They weren't part of the "reality" that the White House intended to portray. The storyline on Iraq was shock and awe followed by Pfc. Jessica Lynch followed by the big statue coming down followed by schools being repainted. Soon enough, of course, the press was reporting a different version, but the initial burst of image-making made a lasting impression, and until very recently, American officials were still going over to Baghdad and coming back with tales of a success in the making. In a strange way, the insurgency -- by making the practice of journalism so difficult in Iraq -- has enabled the administration to keep promoting its sunny tales, in the general absence of American eyewitnesses.

In the wake of Katrina, Washington trotted out the same strategy -- and was made to look foolish and devastatingly incompetent. As the floodwaters kept mounting, officials from the president on down persisted in delivering self-congratulatory pronouncements, when it was plainly obvious to anyone with a television set or a newspaper subscription that New Orleans and its remaining residents were in horrifying distress.

Reporters this time were embedded not with the still-idle National Guard units but with the crowds at the Superdome, and as hard as FEMA might now try to create a different construct of reality, it won't stand. Pushing the unfortunate dead out of view is not respectful but in fact the final indignity: Neglected and marginalized in life, they are to have no presence in death.