AS IF THE antebellum antics of Senator Trent Lott and President Bush were not enough, the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina can be measured even more profoundly by the disappearance of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Lott is the senator who romanticized himself right out of the Senate majority leadership by praising the late Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for president on a segregationist platform. Lott was one of those people who lost his Gulf Coast home to Katrina. That brought Lott no closer to understanding the human misery in Katrina's wake.
While New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was pleading in expletives for help from the White House and predicting that thousands of lives would be washed away, Lott had the gall to say, ''I am pleased with the federal government response."
