Bush eats cockroach of responsibility

From the editor of The Progressive:

Bush Eats Cockroach of Responsibility

By Matthew Rothschild

Wow, that must have been a hard sell to go to the President and tell him he’d have to accept responsibility for Katrina.

Bush thinks being President means never having to say you’re sorry. He told Bob Woodward once that the “interesting thing about being the President” was “I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

But now he’s got a lot of explaining to do.

“To the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” he said, looking all the world like he’d just eaten a raw cockroach.

Be honest: To a huge extent, the federal government didn’t fully do its job.

So Bush must take responsibility for all of that, and for many of the needless deaths in Katrina’s aftermath.

This was Bush’s bad karma: His cronyism, his detachment, and his disdain for domestic public works have come back to haunt him.

But this isn’t a game of political gotcha.

It’s an indictment of a style and an ideology of governance, with real human costs.

And how embarrassing is it for the man who prided himself so much on his role as protector of the nation after 9/11 to have to now confess that he’s not even sure the federal government is prepared to deal with “a severe attack or another severe storm”?

The best Bush could muster was, “That’s a very important question.”

Yeah, it is.

And it’s his job to have an adequate answer for that question. Five years later, he still can’t come up with one.