"I take responsibility"

[Chaerophon]

However, in this case the Bush fat cat should not pay the price in the first place. It was mostly the fault of the local and state government, who did not get off their fat asses to do anything.

Have you read anything that Walkiry is saying? 'Mostly'? We ARE talking about degrees here. Does some responsibility ultimately lie with the federal executive? Yup. How much is a great question. Unfortunately, I don't think that it is the only factor that ought to be taken into account in determining 'which fat cats should pay'. One factor that is important to consider in attributing the validity of 'punishment' for responsibility is, in fact, the intent, or justification for one's actions that led to such an occurence. How many people died as a result of FEMA's failure may not be the sole issue in determining whether Bush deserves punishment for his part in the debacle. Bush does deserve some responsibility, and it may be that the REASONS for FEMA's failure are just as important in determining suitable punishment for those deaths. I, unlike you, will provide some reasons.

One of Bush's important jobs is to ensure that his appointments are made on the basis of qualification, and not cronyism. He is the last bastion against cronyism; his is the final and ultimate say, whether he is, in fact, a puppet, or not. When cronyism results in loss of life (which Bush's appointment of Michael Brown ultimately did), he has failed in one of his major duties as president - he thought of his friends before he thought of the people of the United States in making a major appointment, and many Americans died because of it. Whether ALL of their deaths are a result of his decision is not the issue. Some, I would say many, would have survived had FEMA been more adequately prepared, and the 'reasons' for those peoples deaths are not justifiable on the grounds that an 'accident' occurred or that a theoretical disposition turned out to be flawed in practice.

Government is a balancing act; it is very often true that governmental decisions can be rationalized in terms of a 'theoretical calculus' of loss of life (even in the case of things like tax law, e.g. we cut corporate tax rates to increase overall prosperity / trickle down will ultimately result in a greater benefit than loss to society). I would venture that one important way in which actions can be justified is on the basis of a projected benefit-to-loss ratio that takes into account, among other things, the value of a life, what makes a life valuable, and the relationship of a given option to a gain or loss in life. Of course, the veracity of such projections cannot be known prior to the imposition of a given policy. Nonetheless, when one has justified a given policy option (in this case, an appointment) by reference to its projected impact, and said action nonetheless results in loss of life, the person who is responsble for the failure might be at least partially excused on moral grounds, (if not necessarily practical ones) in that it was a failure of ideology, or some such thing and not an obvious, outright betrayal of trust (an action that did not justify itself on the basis of some such calculus would be, to my mind, a betrayal of trust on the part of government).

Bush's action in appointing Brown was not and could not be motivated by anything remotely resembling such a theoretical calculus (and now, unlike before, it is obvious), and the ultimate result was a significant loss of life. He took on the responsibility of running for the presidency, and people voted for him on the basis (among other things) of their belief that he was the best available candidate to be making such decisions on their behalf. It appears to me that he failed them, and that the reasons for his failure were not related to miscalulations or 'failures of ideology', but to his allegiance to a friend over his duty. That is why I believe that he deserves to be punished for his actions, whether or not, strictly speaking, he is to blame for all or even a majority of the deaths.