At the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’ harrowing play set in New Orleans, the shattered Blanche Dubois looks up, with fear and hope, into the eyes of the doctor who has come to take her away. She tells him, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

This week, strangers from all walks of life stepped forward with a helping hand for the people of New Orleans. Ordinary citizens called the Red Cross and other relief organizations with donations large and small, to help suffering people along the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration played the role of the heartless Stanley Kowalski.

Apparently the administration’s cruel indifference isn’t polling well. So they’re doing the only thing they know how to do: they’re trying to shift blame to state and local officials:

Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country’s emergency management.

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Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state’s emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

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Bush, who has been criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government.

On the streets of New Orleans, Blanche Dubois met a woman selling “flores para los muertos” — flowers for the dead.

In the America of George W. Bush, that’s increasingly becoming a solid business opportunity.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd:

W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn’t dry. Bye, bye, American lives. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,” he told Diane Sawyer.

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Why does this self-styled “can do” president always lapse into such lame “who could have known?” excuses.

Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs.

Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.’s prewar reports.

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans’s sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy’s uneasy fishbowl.

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It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle … lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals.

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans — most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first — they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn’t change: it is immutable, and it is destiny.

As always, the president’s first priority, the one that sped him from Crawford toward California, was saving himself: he had to combat the flood of record-low poll numbers that was as uncontrollable as the surging of Lake Pontchartrain. It was time, therefore, for another disingenuous pep talk, in which he would exploit the cataclysm that defined his first term, 9/11, even at the price of failing to recognize the emerging fiasco likely to engulf Term 2.

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But on a second go-round, even the right isn’t so easily fooled by this drill…. This time the fecklessness and deceit were all too familiar. They couldn’t be obliterated by a bullhorn or by the inspiring initial post-9/11 national unity that bolstered the president until he betrayed it. This time the heartlessness beneath the surface of his actions was more pronounced.

You could almost see Mr. Bush’s political base starting to crumble at its very epicenter, Fox News, by Thursday night. Even there it was impossible to ignore that the administration was no more successful at securing New Orleans than it had been at pacifying Falluja.

A visibly exasperated Shepard Smith, covering the story on the ground in Louisiana, went further still, tossing hand grenades of harsh reality into Bill O’Reilly’s usually spin-shellacked “No Spin Zone.” Among other hard facts, Mr. Smith noted “that the haves of this city, the movers and shakers of this city, evacuated the city either immediately before or immediately after the storm.” What he didn’t have to say, since it was visible to the entire world, was that it was the poor who were left behind to drown.

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On Thursday morning, the president told Diane Sawyer that he hoped “people don’t play politics during this period of time.” Presumably that means that the photos of him wistfully surveying the Katrina damage from Air Force One won’t be sold to campaign donors as the equivalent 9/11 photos were. Maybe he’ll even call off the right-wing attack machine so it won’t Swift-boat the Katrina survivors who emerge to ask tough questions as it has Cindy Sheehan and those New Jersey widows who had the gall to demand a formal 9/11 inquiry.

But a president who flew from Crawford to Washington in a heartbeat to intervene in the medical case of a single patient, Terri Schiavo, has no business lecturing anyone about playing politics with tragedy.

Chief Justice Rehnquist has died. George W. Bush and Pat Robertson get another chance to reshape the Court in their own image.

Rehnquist was certainly part of the reliable conservative wing of the court, but he was rarely as radical in his views as Bush icons Scalia or Thomas. Bush can replace the 80-year-old Rehnquist with someone much younger, who will steer the Court and the country for decades to come.

Confirmation hearings for John Roberts begin this week. Watch closely.