God knows a real politician would have played it better. A real politician would have landed his helicopter in the right place, would have made the right scripted comments, and would never have made a verbal misstep.

He would have been photographed next to the right people, been seen picking up the right rubble, and maybe even slid the right tear down one side of his face.

And that would have worked. Plenty of people would have been impressed and touched. Screw the facts of the matter, this is GREAT television.

Clinton would have played this like a Stradivarius. Bush tends to break strings.

Once the White House started to spin the accusations of poor leadership and bad management by fighting against "the blame game" (note they have taken the time to coin a phrase) instead of putting some serious leadership into the recovery effort, once they decided that their response to criticism would be to mock it first rather than to disprove it, they lost their claim to put partisanship behind us in the face of this disaster. It's up to the leadership to lead by example; this is the example they choose to set.

Once again, Mr. Bush and the people who work for him have shown what he means by being a "uniter, not a divider": we unite to approve every little thing he does, and we call those who disagree or criticize "dividers", because we must establish that they are always wrong. I don't know why I had hoped our leaders would act different this time, but hope often makes a fool of me.

I have disproved most of the criticisms myself, and I didn't need Bush "talking points" to do it. Ignore it if you want, it's only "facts and numbers," and that means nothing compared to feelings, impressions, and political skills.

I will make an assumption, and assume you haven't spent a lot of time gathering information off the internet from both mainstream and other sources this past week.

The attacks on Bush came almost instantly, and became relentless and furious. With few exceptions, only Bush, and his appointees, were targeted. The attacks invoked incompetence, class war, racism, environmentalism, and the war in Iraq. That's just the mainstream. The kooks accused Bush of deliberate murder, up to and including the destruction of levees by dynamite during the storm to "save" rich neighborhoods by flooding poor ones.

If the administration is responding, it's about frigging time. Complaining about that is like complaining about someone finally pulling a gun after sustaining a dozen knife wounds in a fight. Like a breaching whale, Ted Kennedy has broken the surface, and inhaled about four thousand gallons of air. When he lets it out, it's going to be endless, and smell like old fish.

I'll tell you what I told Robert. Wait and see what comes out of this. I didn't get my stuff from the Wall Street Journal. I did the research, Mary Anne.