Interrupting the president's vacation was an avoidable tragedy.

As you may know, I get all of my news from "The Daily Show." And although I'd heard warnings that the tone of national media coverage of the Katrina disaster was shifting -- me, I mostly monitor New Orleans media, being unable to pull away from the tragedy still unfolding there -- it wasn't until Jon Stewart last night showed clips from the president's Tuesday news op that I got a taste of the federal abdication of responsibility that's going on this week.

Stewart came out with both barrels. It was about as good as it gets, both as political comment and as political comedy. He reminded viewers that when Bill Clinton dated Monica Lewinsky, it was a failure of the federal government at the very top, and every member of Clinton's party had to come out and ritually denounce him. "Hurricane Katrina is President Bush's Monica Lewinsky," Stewart said to a din of applause, adding, "The difference being that tens of thousands were not stranded in Monica Lewinsky's vagina."

Stewart played a clip reel with all the hits, showing the tone-deafness of the Bush Administration to the magnitude of human suffering going on in the Gulf Coast: Bush heading west to push his Social Security program after the storms had struck; Bush flying to Washington to do "GMA" and telling Diane Sawyer "we" didn't know the levees could be breached; Bush telling "Brownie" over the weekend he was doing a great job.

Video from Tuesday's "Daily Show" should be posted here today sometime. It's probably whipping around the BitTorrentsphere as we speak. (Update: CrooksAndLiars.com has it.) In the meantime, I've posted above the checklist graphic from Ed Helms' segment, which was one long extended and very funny riff about the massive federal effort being waged right now to save ... this president. At one point, talking about the herculean resources being thrown at this effort to save ... this president, Helms put up the list, noting that experts kept track of the disasters striking the Bush Administration by naming them alphabetically. Now, we as Americans must come together and do what we can to restore order and normality to ... this president.

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One thing Stewart did not address is what I'm calling the Magic School Bus theory: that canard that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin could have saved thousands of people by loading them into the 350 school buses at his disposal and gotten them out of there before the levees broke.

This theory only works if you suffer from short term memory loss and forget (a) that with Katrina bearing down on New Orleans, tens of thousands of residents were refusing to leave, something that Dan Verbeck witnessed himself, as you'll hear in the interview I posted below; and (b) that the actual tragedy came when the levees were breached, something that the federal government -- and only the federal government -- could have done something about ahead of time, and (c) once the levees did break, city officials were everywhere, they worked efficiently and effectively, and FEMA let them down. Also, (d) there were 350 school buses.  An average of 10-20 people, plus possessions, could have boarded each bus.  That wouldn't have even saved "20,000 lives," as Fred Barnes claimed ... and that assumes residents of the Ninth Ward would have agreed to evacuate.

So don't give us the Magic School Bus theory, Shep, Fred, Neil, Karl ... how did Rather used to say it, or at least Harry Shearer impersonating Rather? That dog won't hunt.