No thinking American should have any doubt now that Bush is unfit to be Commander in Chief of the American Empire. The federal screw up with Katrina was so big that all of Bush's spin masters couldn't put his carefully crafted image back together again.

Humpty Dumpty truly had a great fall.

The Republicans, led by their hatchet man, house leader Tom Delay, tried aggressively to pass the buck and deflecting the blame on to the local leaders -- the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor. But the American media for once refused to serve as stenographers for power. The mounting heaps of evidence showing that the fault for the disaster within the disaster lay with Bush's administration overwhelmed the Bush apologists who were forced to change their strategy. Now is not the time to lay blame, they said, hoping that the American public's short attention span would help them ride out the political storm.

The Katrina mess was tied to another Bush administration disaster his foreign policy. The Bush team insisted the growing mess in Iraq had impeded the rescue and recovery effort, but other US government officials, in unusual moments of candour, revealed otherwise. Lieutenant General Steve Blum, Chief of National Guard Bureau bluntly told the Associated Press that the absence of the Mississippi's National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana' 256 Infantry Brigade hurt the recovery effort. 'Their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," The general said.

How convincing was the conclusion that the Katrina rescue and recovery was a disaster of a bureaucratic making? Bush, a president who is never wrong, who never admits mistakes and who never holds any one in his administration accountable for blunders, finally had to cut his political losses and strip Michael Brown, FEMA's embattled director, of his duties involving the relief effort and ship him back to Washington.

A week earlier, Bush had praised Brown for doing "a heck of a job." Yet, the public could see as the disaster within the disaster unfolded that Brown was out of touch with what was happening in New Orleans. He actually blamed the victims in flooded New Orleans for their dire situation because they did not leave. He didn't seem to know -- or in his haste to shift the blame --, simply ignored the fact that many of New Orleans residents were too poor to own vehicles or didn't have the money to get them to safety. So clueless was Brown that he didn't know that the people stuck in the New Orleans convention centre didn't have food or water.

The press revealed that Brown had padded his resume concerning his experience with emergency preparedness. It turned out Brown is one of many unqualified political appointments in the Bush administration. This is serious stuff, considering that Bush has claimed we are at war with terrorism and he has maintained that he has strengthened homeland security.

But the American public shouldn't accept Brown as the Bush administration fall guy. Plenty of evidence has been uncovered, showing that the fault lies higher up the bureaucratic chain to at least Michael Chernoff, head of Homeland Security.

You won't hear Bush rhetorically asking the American people, as he did in the 2004 election -- Are we safer today than we were before 9-11? Instead, Bush has cut his losses and publicly admitted to the American people that he had screwed up his handling of Hurricane Katrina. In the long run, this may be the best move made by Karl Rove, Bush's puppeteer, since the American people are suckers for redemption. Maybe we will see George Bush, Jr. on American television with his own down home cooking show Ala American entrepreneur Martha Stewart who has been released from jail and is now on the high road to redemption.

But his numbers in the popularity polls continue to fall, as they should, given his continued incompetent handling of domestic and foreign policy issues. So the big political question is whether Bush has enough time to restore his credibility with the American people and save his failing presidency.

Ron Chepesiuk is a visiting professor of journalism at Chittagong University and a Research Associate with the National Defence College.