After Katrina: President Bush's inadvertent admission of failure

There's something maddeningly nauseating (and funny in a really bad way) about President Bush's far-too-little-far-too-late proclamations in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of Katrina. Here's how WaPo begins its account:

President Bush, marking the one-year anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, promised today a "better and more effective response" in the event of another hurricane, saying the catastrophic storm exposed government failure at "all levels."

This is like admitting that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In ignorance -- in straying from the talking points or in sticking to ones with fissures, unintentional or not -- comes a kernel of truth. In promising a "better and more effective response," Bush is admitting, unwittingly or not, that the response to Katrina, a response that was ultimately his own responsibility, was neither good nor effective. How else to explain the fact that New Orleans remains a disaster zone a year after Katrina? Katrina may have "exposed government failure at 'all levels,'" but it exposed it most acutely in the Oval Office.

Bush said that "[w]e will stand with the people of southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi until the job is done".

A little late, no?