It's malaise, not mayonnaise

The Bush administration is getting raked over pretty hard in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As a veteran of more hurricanes than I can remember (though none even remotely so devastating), my reaction is to say that loading this incident with partisan blame is just hideous. Hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable, and worse, each one proffers a fairly specialized sort of damage.
Even at the point (Friday) that the Hurricane seemed clearly heading for New Orleans, there's not much more that could've been done on a federal level because no one knew how the damage would manifest. First reports suggested storm surge and wind damage would be the main destructive forces, and then predictions got somewhat toned down when the storm weakened before landfall.

But, probably understandably, no one could've predicted that the worst damage would come a day after the storm form a broken levee. And the ensuing violence and chaos was probably both inevitable and equally unpredictable.

So now Bush is reacting, but problematically, he's under the burden of negative public opinion and is apoligizing.

President Bush ordered more than 7,000 active duty forces to the Gulf Coast on Saturday as his administration intensified efforts to rescue survivors and send aid to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast in the face of criticism it did not act quickly enough.

"In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need," Bush said.

Usually Bush is, if anything, too good about refusing to apoligize and being proactive in his messaging (I seem to recall one of those insipid NYT Sarah Vowell columns being about how Bush would never live up to Carter's allegedly great legacy because Bush would never apoligize a la the malaise speech). But just like those awful BP oil ads - "we're working on it" - political excuse-making not only keeps the actor on the defensive, it mainly just serves to further associate the actor/company with wrong doing. You're playing into your opponents' hands.