Where to begin? From a gripping, emotional Meet the Press to various mendacities to U.S. Rep. Jon Porter doing with a single U-Haul what the whole of the federal government should have done from the beginning, Hurricane Katrina fallout is everywhere.

Kudos to the Review-Journal, by the way, for sending Road Warrior Omar Sofradzija to the disaster zone with a company of Las Vegas-based National Guardsmen. His first-person accounts have been compelling, and put a familiar Las Vegas media face in the midst of the tragedy. Why, it’s almost like the R-J stole a page from TV instead of vice versa, for once.

We won’t spend much time Bush-bashing here. We’ve done enough of that in our column (that will appear in this week’s CityLife, published Thursday). It’s sufficient to say that continuing his Texas R&R is a pale sin in comparison to putting a crony in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. When top Republicans — including William Kristol — are saying you did a bad job, it should be a sign even to the insulated Bush that things have gone off the rails.

Hell, when Cuba and Jamaica have better hurricane planning than the United States, we all know something has gone off the rails.

One of the most gripping episodes of Meet the Press took place Sunday, as an obviously angry Tim Russert grilled Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (FEMA is now under Chertoff’s supervision.) Russert asked the right questions, in the right way, for a city destroyed by nature.

But nothing could compare to the parish president who revealed that his own emergency services director’s mother drowned at a hospital, waiting to be rescued. If the mother of the guy who plans rescues isn’t safe, how could anyone be safe?

U.S. Rep. Jon Porter missed the vote to grant $10.5 billion in hurricane relief to the states affected by the tragedy, but he had a good excuse. He loaded up a U-Haul with supplies and drove to Mississippi, to help the family of his campaign fund-raiser, Lindsey McQueen. Accompanied by McQueen’s fiancée, political consultant Mike Slanker, they turned themselves into first-responders. The money will eventually do more good, but Porter’s approach got more done sooner. (McQueen’s family is safe, but their property was destroyed.)

It wasn’t just the levees that were breeched in New Orleans, it was the gossamer-thin line that separates civilization from anarchy. Are we all just a few cops, running water and working electricity shy of turning into looters? Certainly, people do what they have to do to survive, and taking food or medicine in a crisis can be forgiven. But clothes, jewelry and big-screen TVs? Truly awful. Yet it happens in most every tragedy.

A colleague forwarded us a copy of a column penned by someone who blamed “the welfare state” for the disaster in New Orleans. We read the whole thing, wondering if perhaps the author would be honest enough to say that black people are prone to looting and laziness, but he never did. Is it progress, we wonder, that most racists can’t seem to spew the bile in the way they once did? Or is it more insidious than before?

(As a side note, here in Las Vegas, the state Department of Parole and Probation removed the last few ex-cons from the halfway homes of confirmed racist Michael O’Sullivan. He says he’s a victim of a political vendetta, but we don’t think so. A guy with a criminal record and allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against him isn’t a good choice to lead former criminals to a better life anyway, and that’s got nothing to do with his hateful political ideology. And something good came out of the revelations that he believes in separating Jews and minorities from whites: The state will now do background checks on halfway house managers. Better late than never.)

Back to Katrina: We’ll bet that some of the leaders who predicted our occupation in Iraq would drain our capacity to respond to domestic crisis are saying “I told you so now.” It’s not been proven that the lack of military resources was caused by our long occupation of Iraq, but the perception is there.

And speaking of perception, what does it say that the perception that the government didn’t really care about the poor, mostly black areas of New Orleans has gained so much prominence? The reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks wasn’t so delayed, or the San Francisco earthquake, or hurricanes in Florida (some of which hit minority-dominated areas, too, to be fair). Why the shoddy response in New Orleans?

No matter what else, the city lies in ruins. It will be a decade or more before it’s back, since the water flooding the streets and the sludge washed in with it are likely toxic. This is no homeowner-sweeping-mud-with-a-broom kind of cleanup; this is a guys-in-white-hazmat-suits kind of cleanup.

Dennis Hastert, ever the master of decorum, opined in the midst of the tragedy that perhaps New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt. It lies below sea level, and is protected by demonstrably inadequate levees to keep water from flooding the streets. Perhaps we shouldn’t rebuild, he suggested.

But other than its value as a port, New Orleans is a symbol, a cultural icon whose devotees can never walk away. That status is only enhanced by the fact that, in her darkest hour, the government failed her and her people. Rebuilding will happen, with better, bigger levees, more intelligent flood control and better planning for future hurricanes that are sure to hit.

It can’t not happen.