The GOP, Hurricane Katrina, sleazy political opportunism and some advice for the Democrats.

(And isn't that a thoroughly all-encompassing title?)

Once more over to Pumpkinhead Russert and his grilling of DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, in which Chertoff is pushing another example of GOP spin regarding accountability. See if you can figure out what it is based on Chertoff's excerpts:

You know, Tim, what we're contemplating now is the fact that we are very, very much in the middle of a crisis. There's a bit of a sense that you get that some people think it's now time to draw a sigh of relief and go back and do the after-action analysis, and there'll be plenty of time for that ... We will have time to go back and do an after-action report, but the time right now is to look at what the enormous tasks ahead are ... I will tell you that my focus now is on what is going to go forward ... The question I would put to people is what do you want to have us spend our time on now? Do we want to make sure we are feeding, sheltering, housing and educating those who are distressed, or do we want to begin the process of finger-pointing? I know that as far as I'm concerned I have got to be focused on, and everybody else in this government, and the president has made this very clear, we have got to focus on moving forward to deal with some very real emergencies which are going to be happening in the next days and weeks because of the fact that we have to deal with an unprecedented movement of evacuees... Obviously, every minute matters in a situation like this.

Did you catch all that? See, there's just no time for discussions of accountability or finger pointing, these people need help now, every minute counts, it's critical that we spend every second and absolutely all of our resources dealing with this crisis, and it would be very bad to get side-tracked by irrelevancies. Got that?

Now contrast that with the fact that the GOP, when it wants to, has no problem at all getting side-tracked:

Moving quickly to fill the vacancy left by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's death, President Bush on Monday nominated Judge John Roberts to the nation's top judicial post...

Bush called on the Senate to confirm Roberts within a month.

So it would be exceedingly irresponsible to discuss accountability with respect to Katrina, but hey, there's plenty of time to talk about the Supreme Court and let's get this done quickly, OK?

Really, the Dems should just tell Bush to fuck off. They should tell him that if there's time to wrangle over Supreme Court nominations, then there sure as hell is time to figure out who's ass should be grass when it comes to Katrina.

And, once again, you just know they're not going to take my advice. I don't know why I even bother anymore.