There’s little doubt the Bush administration has long hoped that Americans would forget the word “Katrina” and all it connotes about a federal government asleep at the wheel, a president more interested in photo ops than action, the terrible human cost of incompetent government, the consequences of the “starve the beast” ideology, and the unkept promises made by the president himself on national television from Jackson Square. A report about to be released by a House Republican task force on the Katrina response–nicely amplified by a Senate Homeland Security Committee interrogation of a feckless Michael Chertoff–shows that even the most partisan GOP inquiry into the disaster produces stomach-churning revulsion and serious fears about the federal government’s ability to deal with a future terrorist attack. You can read about it in today’s New Dem Dispatch. If the Bushies were praying for a distraction from the vice president’s Lethal Weapon ’06 drama, the Good Lord answered them quite righteously.