Bush: the Teflon is falling off

Americans will cut you lots of slack if you’re President. You can lie to get us into a war 10,000 miles away. Your fake “reasons” for this war can keep changing every week, and nobody seems to notice. American soldiers keep getting killed and maimed in this endless quagmire — ho hum. Our deficit swells to record levels because of the Iraqi war and massive tax cuts — Yawn.

But the free ride doesn’t last forever. There are some things even a sheltered pampered trustfunded president can't get away with:

You can not sit there with your thumbs up your ass while the worst natural disaster in our history devastates us.

That was the last straw. The free ride is over. Bush’s political capital has been spent. Suddenly, “Bush” and “accountability” are appearing in the same sentence. “Chickens coming home to roost” is a popular phrase.

Jon Edwards has revived his “Two Americas” theme from the 2004 election campaign, to much larger applause than he ever got last year. Harry Reid said “How much time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation?” Nancy Pelosi said “There were two disasters last week: first, the natural disaster, and second, the man-made disaster, the disaster made by mistakes made by FEMA."

The same fractured, diffused, divided Democrats who were afraid to say anything about Iraq or the environment or tax cuts for the rich, are suddenly unified and unafraid.

Hillary Clinton has announced that FEMA should be separated from the Homeland Security Department, and that we need a 9/11-style investigation into what went wrong.

She described the underfunded, understaffed and inept/oblivious FEMA as “a recipe for disaster. There was nobody in charge at the federal government level and no one willing to take responsibility to work with state and local governments. There is no plan, no overall strategy. We don't have a seamless, smooth-running response machine.”

For the first time (and it sure took long enough), the Bush administration is in the hot seat. The tails-between-their-legs opposition is suddenly unafraid and ready to kick ass.