First, let's deal with poor old Brian. Dubya comes later, compliments of The New York Times.

Mulroney's gift for "the blarney" is legendary - simply an inherited Irish trait locked deep within his DNA. However, insiders say that in truth, the former PM is simply a habitual liar. In fact, fellow Conservative and former Ontario Premier David Peterson says he never trusted a word Mulroney said.

So I figure Mulroney and his ex old pal-turned-backstabber, author Peter C. Newman, really deserve oneanother.

Mulroney, the self-aggrandizing egomaniac, and Newman, the consummate, opportunistic brown-noser, certainly make a lovely couple. Even in divorce.

The current credibility gap-flap over Newman's new book of tape-recorded revelations about the pithy, profane, self-possessed Mulroney is simply another example of the old political adage, "Trust no one, especially friends."

And it certainly demonstrates how misplaced trust can come back to bite you in the ass, big time.

As a young boy growing up in Baie Comeau, Quebec, Mulroney was selected to sing for Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary U.S. press baron who'd created Baie Comeau as part of his pulp and paper empire.

The 7-year-old Mulroney, son of an electrician, was wide-eyed with delight as he got up on top of the piano in the grand company house where McCormick stayed during his Baie Comeau visits.

At the colonel's prompting, our future prime minister sang "Dearie" and a few other ditties ("When Irish Eyes are Smiling," perhaps?).

Apparently taken with this pleasing performance, the colonel handed the boy the immense sum of $50 U.S.

After that, Brian was summoned to sing whenever the colonel came to town.

Mulroney relishes the story. One of his former law partners, Frank Common, told me he'd heard Mulroney recount it "about a thousand times."

It was apparently a pivotal lesson. Mulroney realized he could rise above the dreary little world of a pulp-and-paper town and taste the big, exciting world of money and power that lay beyond.

All he had to do was please the colonel, sing him a little song.

Pleasing the powerful turned out to be something Mulroney excelled at.

He was certainly good at pleasing the business elite, which contributed more than $52 million to his party's coffers in appreciation for his tax and trade policies.

Ordinary Canadians seem to dislike Mulroney however — not because they're offended by his coarse language, but because they sense that, deep down, he never stopped singing for the colonel.

By Frank Rich

Once Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of "compassionate conservatism," the lack of concern for the "underprivileged" his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

In the chaos unleashed by Katrina, these plot strands coalesced into a single tragic epic played out in real time on television. The narrative is just too powerful to be undone now by the administration's desperate recycling of its greatest hits: a return Sunshine Boys tour by the surrogate empathizers Clinton and Bush 1, another round of prayers at the Washington National Cathedral, another ludicrously overhyped prime-time address flecked with speechwriters' "poetry" and framed by a picturesque backdrop. Reruns never eclipse a riveting new show.

Thus, as The Salt Lake Tribune discovered a week after Katrina, some 1,000 firefighters from Utah and elsewhere were sent not to the Gulf Coast but to Atlanta, to be trained as "community relations officers for FEMA" rather than used as emergency workers to rescue the dying in New Orleans. When 50 of them were finally dispatched to Louisiana, the paper reported, their first assignment was "to stand beside President Bush" as he toured devastated areas

When there's money on the line, cronies always come first in this White House, no matter how great the human suffering. After Katrina, the FEMA Web site directing charitable contributions prominently listed Operation Blessing, a Pat Robertson kitty that, according to I.R.S. documents obtained by ABC News, has given more than half of its yearly cash donations to Mr. Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network.

If FEMA is that cavalier about charitable donations, imagine what it's doing with the $62 billion (so far) of taxpayers' money sent its way for Katrina relief.

Actually, you don't have to imagine: we already know some of it was immediately siphoned into no-bid contracts with a major Republican donor, the Fluor Corporation, as well as with a client of the consultant Joe Allbaugh, the Bush 2000 campaign manager who ran FEMA for this White House until Brownie (Bush crony Michael Brown), Mr. Allbaugh's college roommate, was installed in his place.

By Maureen Dowd

President George Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction last week, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin.

Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged.

He can keep going back down there, as he did again on Thursday when he gave a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom WMD and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.

How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?

Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like "Brownie".

The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.