Bloomberg.com: Bloomberg Columnists

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&sid=ayjzS5ZIjcDg&refer=columnist_carlson"> Bloomberg.com: Bloomberg Columnists: "Bush Says OK, Blame Me; Now Let's Spend Money: Margaret Carlson Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- You know the world is out of whack when it takes resume inflation to finally move Michael Brown out of his job running the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You'd think letting thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims suffer over four days without food, water, medicine or airlifts would have prompted President George W. Bush to declare, ``Brownie, you're fired.'' Instead, it wasn't until Time magazine reported that Brown's bio listed him as assistant city manager in Edmond, Oklahoma, rather than assistant TO THE city manager, that Brown got the heave-ho from running Katrina operations on Sept. 9. He resigned from FEMA three days later. But the world is really strange when the person who was responsible accepts responsibility and that makes headlines. ``President Says He's Responsible in Storm Lapses,'' the New York Times said on its front page yesterday. Congratulations to the president were all over TV. You'd think he'd picked up a bullhorn and said he was going to get rid of anyone on whose watch those 34 invalids at St. Rita's nursing home died. Good Old Boys It took a while, but Bush realized that his default response to criticism wasn't working. Stubborn denial coupled with boyish mannerisms -- backslapping good-old boy Governor Haley Barbour, commiserating with Mississippi Senator Trent Lott about his lost mansion in Pascagoula, strumming a guitar at an event in San Diego like Tom Cruise in ``Risky Business'' -- aren't enough when we can actually see the bodies floating in black water and feel the misery of people who trusted the government to help them. It's just not going to do this time to toss off a line about trading Sammy Sosa when asked if he'd made any mistakes going after Osama."