Bush stalling Katrina probe

Anyone who remembers President Bush's stall tactics on the 9/11 commission will recognize them here:

The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina by barring administration officials from answering questions and failing to hand over documents, senators leading the investigation said Tuesday.

In some cases, staff at the White House and other federal agencies have refused to be interviewed by congressional investigators, said the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In addition, agency officials won't answer seemingly innocuous questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House, the senators said.

And, this is in response to a Republican-controlled investigation. We're not talking about a non-partisan commission here. We're not talking about fire-breathing Democrats with subpoena power. In fact, further down in the AP story, Republican Senator Susan Collins acknowledges her reluctance to issue subpoenas. From the beginning, the worst that was likely to happen in this investigation was a finding of equal culpability between the feds, the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans.

But, this president can't even fake openness. He won't even pretend to cooperate with an investigation into the devastation, on his watch, of yet another major American city.