Isn't It Rather Tasteless?

Today's reading: Maureen Dowd, Disney on Parade (New York Times).

(ps - the Times has recently changed its policy regarding op-ed pieces ( thanks for the tip, PenPal - and is making us pay to view them, so you may not be able to read this article any longer...)

Regarding the Presidential address, Ms. Dowd states:

On Thursday night, Mr. Bush wanted to appear casually in charge as he waged his own Battle of New Orleans in Jackson Square. Instead, he looked as if he'd been dropped off by his folks in front of a eerie, blue-hued castle at Disney world.

...His gladiatorial walk across the darkened greenswald, past a St. Louis Cathedral bathed in moon glow from White House klieg lights, just seemed to intensify the sense of an isolated, out-of-touch president clinging to hollow symbols as his disastrous disaster agency continues to flail.

In a ruined city - still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40% submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hords of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers - isn' t it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White house generators just to give the president a burnished skin time and a prettified backdrop?