A year ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood end six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, under the auspices of which the Corps of Engineers was to have comprehensively repaired, renovated and strengthened levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a person attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for SLUFCP was diverted into the Iraq war, and most of the necessary repairs and reinforcements to New Orleans' levees were left incomplete or untouched.
Now, in light of those facts (which you may verify by however many means you choose -- I'm not making them up), your buttertion that Bush couldn't have done anything from Washington is asinine.
What's even more asinine is Bush stopping to smirk for the cameras and strum a guitar at Coronado Naval Base in Texas with entertainer Mark Wills as flooding due to Federally-neglected levees end hundreds on the Gulf Coast.
That said, Bush's finally having cut short his latest of too many vacations did finally solve his pesky little Cindy Sheehan avoidance problem, didn't it? More than 335 days off so far, in four years and eight months' time. That's more than 72 vacation days -- over two months and two weeks of vacation -- per year. Know anyone else who gets that much vacation time, except perhaps the unemployed and the unemployable? Even the best, hardest-working US President doesn't deserve anywhere near that much vacation time (not that such a President would *take* anywhere near that much vacation time, QED).
Criticism without substance? Hardly. Bush couldn't lead a moth to a porch light.
