Who would have thought that the worst natural disaster in American history would prove a boon to so many people?

Thousands of lives may have been lost, homes and entire neighbourhoods wiped away, businesses destroyed, an entire city so badly damaged lawmakers are seriously suggesting it be abandoned entirely - but for anyone with a pet cause or an axe to grind, Hurricane Katrina and its horrific aftermath appear to be the gifts that keeps on giving.

For Democrats and like-minded Canadians, it's been an opportunity to finally nail George W. Bush - to proclaim that the president who supposedly excels in crises is a fraud.

On the flip side, Mr. Bush's supporters have almost uniformly set their sights on the failings of Democrats - painting New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Lousiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, Senator Mary Landreau and anyone else they can think of as the real architects of the disaster.

Small-government advocates have claimed the victims would have been better-positioned to fend for themselves if they hadn't been coddled for so long with lavish social programs - a line typified by an editorial that appeared on this page earlier in the week.

Big-government advocates have claimed that the victims would have been better positioned to fend for themselves if they hadn't been let down by lacklustre social programs.

Environmentalists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggest damage might have been minimized if the United States had signed onto the Kyoto Protocol. Enviro-skeptics, among them Terence Corcoran in this newspaper, blame enviromentalists for skewing priorities and dissuading governments from projects that could have minimized the hurricane's damage.

Black leaders and celebrities, from Jesse Jackson to Kanye West, have implied or directly claimed it was racism that led to so many victims being stranded for so long. Longtime critics of America's black communities have blamed their lack of leadership for the violence that broke out in the flooded city.

Among those who see media bias lurking behind every corner, liberals have cited uneven coverage of black and white victims and looters, even as right-wing media outlets and much of the blogosphere have obsessed over CNN's allegedly harsh treatment of Mr. Bush.

Anti-war activists, including Cindy Sheehan, have suggested Washington's protracted response is the result of the National Guard and other resources being deployed to Iraq.

Not to be left out, critics of our own government - notably Conservative foreign policy critic Stockwell Day - have somehow found ways to bring it all back to Paul Martin, proclaiming his response slow and insufficiently sympathetic. And populist politicians on both sides of the border have climbed back on to their hobby horses by claiming an oil company conspiracy to raise prices in the disaster's aftermath.

There's a grain of truth to most of these claims. Certainly, there's more than enough culpability to go around - among the local and state governments for their unprepearedness, the feds (the bizarrely inadequate FEMA in particular) for their slow response and, yes, a whole range of other interests for creating the social conditions that made New Orleans ripe for chaos. This was, after all, a natural disaster in name only; considering that the hurricane didn't even hit New Orleans directly, it's fairly obvious that human error had a lot more to do with it.

But the silver lining on Katrina's extremely dark cloud should have been an opportunity for all of us to reconsider longheld biases, our preconceptions challenged by events that nobody saw coming. Those who have staunchly defended Mr. Bush throughout his presidency, for instance, should have had their faith shaken by his lack of leadership at a time of crisis, just as those who usually blame all of America's problems on the Republicans should be wondering why the Democrats in charge at the municipal and state levels weren't up to the job.

It says a great deal about the polarized, dumbed-down nature of North American political debate that on all fronts, the opposite happened. There is little room for nuance. Little room for concessions. Only shots fired from one side of every endless debate to the other. Even the most ghastly crisis imaginable, it seems, can be reduced to the fodder it produces.