Not going back to Cali

In a sign of his application to the project of getting Trent Lott's house rebuilt, Dubya changed his weekend routine and did his radio address live this morning. Carefully phrased to assign blame everywhere except himself, he acted as the expeditionary force for what will doubtless be a key spin point on the Sunday talk shows:

Yet, despite their best efforts, the magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities.

This is excellent news for the State of California, which has been the ingredient for every lame-ass excuse/comparison of Dubya's incompetent operation in Iraq. Why they can't find WMDs --

"We've only been there seven weeks," [Rumsfeld] exclaimed. "It's a country the size of California—it's not as though we've managed to look everywhere," he added,

and why they can't secure the place properly --

Rumsfeld said, "We need to provide security where it's possible, but it's not possible to provide it on every street corner and every portion of a country the size of California."

Now perhaps California being off the hook at the expense of Britain is due to the difference in area -- the former is about twice the size of the latter. But such orders of magnitude never stopped these chumps before. More likely is that the spinners saw the trap in recycling the rhetoric from one fiasco to explain another, and someone looked up an area chart for some handy furrin comparison. Indeed, there are good odds that the comparison was used to explain the scale of the problem to Dubya before he turned it around for the rest of the benighted folk. Since the original California comparison probably was designed to play well in red states (bad stuff = Left Coast), this might be a bad sign for British-American relations.

UPDATE 7 SEP: In a sign that there's always a bigger fool, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens took Dubya's Britain comparison, and made it continental:

"This is the largest disaster in the history of the United States, over an area twice the size of Europe," Stevens said. "People have to understand this is a big, big problem."

This from a buffoon who prided himself on grabbing spending money for "bridges to nowhere" while New Orleans' levee system went underfunded.