Yesterday I spent a few hours answering phones for a Red Cross fundraising event. Someone from the local Red Cross headquarters announced that we were “this close” — very close — to having enough refugees from Hurricane Katrina here in town to open up a shelter.

Some of the phone volunteers wondered: is that good news or bad news? It is very good news, we were told. It means people are getting out of the storm-ravaged areas, and into places where they can be helped.

We were told that the Red Cross was not currently providing any help within New Orleans, because the government would not allow them to go in. Apparently someone in the government thought it would send the wrong message if the Red Cross provided water, food and medical care inside New Orleans, and people would start returning to the city. So the Red Cross waits at countless locations outside the disaster area, waiting for the chance to help refugees.

Last January, conservative columnist David Brooks discussed George W. Bush’s second inaugural address on the PBS News Hour:

I guess I’d say the president has meticulously ruled out the possibility that he might be a mediocre president. He is either going to be a great president and get a lot done, or he is going to be a complete failure

The “great president” or “complete failure” question was settled this week, I think.

David Brooks, yesterday on the PBS News Hour:

This was really a de-legitimization of institutions. Our institutions completely failed us, and it’s not as if this is the first in the past three years. This follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.

We have had, over the past four or five years, a whole series of scandals which have soured the public mood. You’ve seen a rise in feeling that the country’s headed in the wrong direction. And I think this is the biggest one, and the bursting one. And I must say, personally, it’s the one that really says, “Hey, it feels like the seventies now,” where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let’s get out of this mess. I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just — people are sick of it.

Yesterday I quoted E.J. Dionne quoting William Cohen:

Government is the enemy until you need a friend.

Today, via Wonkette, Chrisafer casts doubt on an old Ronald Reagan applause line:

The ten most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the Federal Government, and I’m here to help.”

Not so.

This week should be the watershed for the whole “me first,” every-man-for-himself ideology that has governed this country for almost twenty-five years.