If you thought the government response last year to Hurricane Katrina was bad, stay tuned.

Blogger and Washington analyst Christian Beckner is predicting more trouble ahead, as the Bush Administration continues to ignore domestic needs and divert domestic funding while pre-emptively blaming state and local governments for impending disasters.

The Seattle Times notes a growing list of failures.

British oil company BP announced this month that severe corrosion would close its Alaska pipelines for extensive repairs. Analysts say this may sideline some 200,000 barrels a day of production for several months.

Then an instrument landing system that guides arriving planes onto a runway at Los Angeles International Airport failed for the second time in a week, delaying flights.

Those incidents followed reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence world’s electronic eavesdropping arm, is consuming so much electricity at its headquarters outside Washington that it is in danger of exceeding its power supply.

“If a terrorist group were able to knock the NSA offline, or disrupt one of the nation’s busiest airports, or shut down the most important oil pipeline in the nation, the impact would be perceived as devastating,” Beckner said. “And yet we’ve essentially let these things happen — or almost happen — to ourselves.”

Wait, there’s more.

The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating “at an alarming rate.”

It noted that half the 257 locks operated by the Army Corps of Engineers on inland waterways are functionally obsolete, more than one-quarter of the nation’s bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete, and $11 billion is needed annually to replace aging drinking-water facilities.

So how does our courageous leader respond? Does he step up to the plate and do the hard stuff? Has he ever?

President Bush, asked about the problem during a public question-and-answer session in an April visit to Irvine, Calif., cited last year’s enactment of a comprehensive law reauthorizing highway, transit and road-safety programs.

“Infrastructure is always a difficult issue,” Bush acknowledged. “It’s a federal responsibility and a state and local responsibility. And I, frankly, feel like we’ve upheld our responsibility at the federal level with the highway bill.”

What Pres. “I’ve Never Made a Mistake or At Least Taken Responsibility for It” is saying kinda sorta worked when he tried to defend himself for blowing it during Katrina. It gave the rightwing pundits something to harp on, the idea that maybe local officials were really to blame for the multi-state disaster. And as we know, if a dodge kinda sorta worked once for this idiot, he’ll trot the same horseshit out again and again.

The only problem with all the talk and no action is that in the meantime, our country is at risk. And CYA is not a policy.