None dare call this leadership: Remember New Orleans? (When GWB announces a bold initiative, you can count the hours till it's forgotten)

In this final week of the year I've been scrambling to use up every last scrap of PTO time detailed in our employee manual. So on the "day off" I took today, I didn't get into the office until about 11:30 (and then didn't work for much more than three hours), meaning I had a chance to look at some of the Ellen rerun. You could tell it was a rerun, because the Donald Trump was on flogging the season premiere of The Apprentice.

So I assume the show was originally run in September, which may explain why Ellen was devoting so much time and energy to raising money for hurricane disaster relief. I don't get to see the show much, so I don't know whether the money-raising has continued. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Ellen continues to put more time and energy into disaster relief than—to pick a random example—the president of the U.S. and his "team."

My goodness, these people are something. I mean, anyone who's made it past, say, puberty is thoroughly inured to the concept of pols making cynically empty promises. But Land o' Goshen, these people have raised it to an art form. When Master Rove puts one of those phony promises into his puppet's mouth, these bozos no longer maintain the pretense that the words will even be remembered by the time the lying doodyhead closes his mouth.

Like, remember when Chimpy was going to be the scourge of AIDS in Africa? Or when he was going to send men to Mars or Neptune or Alpha Centauri or somewhere? Some of these "initiatives" (for want of a better word) have come from so far out in left field that the unwary are tempted to figure, Why would they bother bringing it up if they didn't have something in mind?

Eventually, though, they built up a track record to serve as a guideline. And the record indicates that whatever it was they had in mind had nothing to do with the issue at hand. If there was no obvious political advantage to be glommed via the empty sound-off, then the idea may have been just to change the subject. Changing the subject, after all, is one of the few things this administration has done with consistent success.

So when our Chimpy got up, even made that cemeterylike appearance in abandoned Jackson Square in destroyed New Orleans, to announce the planned rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, there was no reason to expect that anything remotely resembling that was in the cards, any more than conquering AIDS on Mars was. It was just a puff of lukewarm air, except for the part where the Bush cronies and all those other leeches were granted open access to all the "reconstruction" boodle they could get their clutches on.

Eventually, as we all know, the reconstruction of New Orleans somehow morphed into an all-out congressional war on the poor. When it comes to leadership, I take Ellen a lot more seriously.