Feeling Indicted? Buck Up.

Wilma 1, Florida's Bush, 0

Last week, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) hailed his state's fantastic preparedness for Wilma. Florida, in stark contrast to Louisiana -- run, of course, by Democrats -- was going to rely on its own local emergency officials, he said, not wait for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"We are battle-tested, well resourced, well trained," Bush boasted just before Wilma hit.

"In the case of Louisiana," he opined on Monday right after the storm blasted across his state, "it was left to the federal government to fill a void, and the consequences are there for the rest of the world to see."

"Florida was well prepared and positioned to respond to the storm," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Tuesday. "The state is doing a great job," he said. Not "a heck of a job," but darn good.

But by Wednesday, with gas, water, ice and food shortages and deliveries in disarray, Floridians were complaining mightily about the lack of emergency planning and coordination, and police were keeping order at some gas stations.

And Gov. Bush was singing a different tune. "We did not perform to where we want to be," he said.

Coordinator to Brookings

Word on the street is that Carlos Pascual , a career foreign service officer, former ambassador to Ukraine and now State Department coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, is off early next year to the Brookings Institution to be director of its foreign policy studies program. He would replace James B. Steinberg , who is off to be dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.

Any glutton for punishment interested in the State Department job -- figuring out what went wrong in postwar Iraq and policy planning on the reconstruction effort -- should send a rsum to Condoleezza Rice, c/o the State Department. Thick skin and ability to deal with cranky Congress required.