And how is this Bush's fault?

Stupidity!

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.

This travesty is dictated by FEMA's need for community relations? How does having 1400 trained firefighters sit around being trained for something else improve community relations?

If I were Bush hearing this, I'd be tearing my hair out. Of course, he has to take the blame, because the buck stops with him. But I think he would have been happy to have left FEMA the way it was instead of melding it into DHS. I doubt that his inquiry will be as politically tainted as the ones held by Congress, but I'll bet that it will be more effective. In a lot of ways, the President is more under the command of bureaucracies than they are under him. He can't fire anybody without months or struggle and getting new appointees approved is almost as bad.