“I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot.”

                                      —Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, LA

Myself, I would like a better idiot also. Yesterday’s list of recent quotes and photo op faux pas from the Washington Post makes me think that W has decided to try his hand at a Will Ferrell impression (he’s not bad!).

Bush had raised eyebrows on his first trip by, among other things, picking Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.—instead of the thousands of mostly poor and black storm victims—as an example of loss. “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house—there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch,” Bush said with a laugh from an airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala.

Later in Biloxi, Miss., Bush tried to comfort two stunned women wandering their neighborhood clutching Hefty bags, looking in vain for something to salvage from the rubble of their home. He kept insisting they could find help at a Salvation Army center down the street, even after another bystander had informed him it had been destroyed.

And at his last stop that day, at the airport outside of New Orleans, Bush lauded the increasingly desperate city as a great town because he used go there and “enjoy myself—occasionally too much.”

Unlike his galvanizing appearance in the rubble of the World Trade Center just days after the 2001 attacks, Bush has stayed far from the epicenter of New Orleans’ suffering. His only foray into the city was to its edges to watch crews plugging one of the breached levees on Friday.

On Monday, he skipped the hardest-hit coastal areas entirely, choosing instead to visit Baton Rouge, the state capital about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, which sustained no damage. He also went to Poplarville, Miss., to walk the streets of a middle-class neighborhood that seemed to suffer little more than snapped trees, a couple off-kilter carport roofs and a downed power line or two.

Apparently it’s difficult to fill a photo-op with homeless, fed-up black people to act as smiley-faced cheerleaders for the right. Do they not look all-American enough? Are they not telegenic with their garbage bags and milk crates? Maybe, if the spirit of human compassion still truly lives, a few hundred of the displaced will get together and build Trent Lott a new house. Call Habitat for Humanity.

Or, if you are more of a visual type, click on my name.