The Calling Card Of Failure

....is when the pols pointing the finger at their opponents start tearing into each other:

Open warfare appears to have broken out between Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, with Blanco challenging on Wednesday Nagin's authority to order a mandatory citywide evacuation.

"The mayor certainly has ordered that, but the governor, and that would be me, will have to enforce it or implement it," Governor Blanco told the Fox News Channel.

The Louisiana Democrat said she wanted more time to determine "whether or not there's an absolute justification for that," saying she feared any forced evacuation could put people at risk for disease.

"We wouldn't want the next wave of people getting ill and perhaps dying from terrible diseases, and that is a big concern," Blanco told Fox, adding, "We want definite information. We don't need to put more grief on people."

Um, maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the source of these "terrible diseases" in New Orleans itself? Which is what would make evacuating the remaining population a good idea, if, of course, Mayor Nagin hadn't looked down his nose at using the school buses he had at his disposal in favor of demanding the nationalization of Greyhound, leaving the former to get washed away by the flood waters that are teaming with the disease-producing bacteria that can spawn the municipal epidemic Governor Blanco wants to be absolutely sure of before letting Mayor Nagin carry out his evacuation with the buses he doesn't have.

Nagin, of course, has been blaming everybody else, including Governor Blanco, pretty much since this all started, and that hasn't abated in the slightest:

Governor Blanco's decision to pull the rug out from under Mayor Nagin follows by two days Nagin's account to CNN, where he blamed the governor for delaying federal rescue efforts last Friday.

"I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision," he complained.

Reacting to the governor's footdragging, Nagin lamented: "It would have been great if we could have ... told the world that we had this all worked out."

"It didn't happen, and more people died," he added.

If the Blanco administration's stiffing of the Red Cross is any example, he's right in this instance. But then Nagin himself didn't bother implementing the emergency contingency plans on his own city's books when Katrina was bearing down on the Big Easy, rendering him the man who blows his own foot off and then assails everybody around him for not giving him a crutch.

If there's a silver lining to all this juvenile recriminating, it's that it will make it that much harder for national Democrats to prop up their "Katrina kicked Bush's ass" meme, much less sell it to a public that isn't buying it as it is.

Maybe Blanco-Nagin can be added to the Bush-Landrieu undercard....