I myself am inclined to agree, that using this as a platform just to bash Bush is silly but the fact is fact. If someone else was in his place people would have said the same thing. Well, a failure to lead is still a failure. The three biggest disaster threats facing the US according to FEMA are Cali quake, New Orleans hurricane, and New York terror, IIRC. I'll give him a marginal pass on NYC terror because he was only in office for less than a year, and I have no idea if he has led the gov't to improve a quake in CA, but the facts are that he took money (thus not only physical infrastructure but much needed expertise) away from FEMA and did nothing to prepare for a disaster in New Orleans. People keep decrying, but how would he know? Or, it's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but they elected him to be a leader, and he failed to lead. Furthermore, by sending significant National Guard units away from the south and to Iraq, he deprived the citizens of the gulf coast the best trained back-up plan to deal with a disaster. Finally, since, as it turns out, it's common knowledge that this could have happened, the lack of marshalling of federal resources to evacuate the city as the hurricane approached is criminal. No one has a bigger motor pool than the Feds, and yet they did nothing. Many people (though not all) left behind could not evacuate on their own, and now they have to work 100 times harder to save them. As the hurricane bore down on the Gulf Coast, the President was rallying before a homer crowd in San Diego. Failure to lead, cutting funds, doing nothing with the info coming in from FEMA, and then doing not enough in the moments up to the catastrophe all flow uphill, and there's only one man at the top. And so the games begins.... I'm just going to go on record that Bush seems to have a horrible ability when it comes to thinkingout the results of his actions. "That memo about Osama didn't seem important." "You're either with us, or agianst us." "Who needs an exit strategy in Iraq!" "Bring them on!" "Why would they continue funding hurricane evac planning for an area identified as highly likely to be hit by a hurricane?" I'll leave now.