I'm going to give Vice President Joseph Biden a break and declare that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has surrendered his "Most Ignominious Performance by a Government Spokesperson" title to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This is not a partisan dig. We all know how staunchly Michael Brown, President Bush's hand-picked FEMA director, defended this crown.

In case you missed it, Speaker Pelosi set off a firestorm when she escalated her dispute with the CIA for, as she alleges, "lying and misleading Congress" regarding the agency's use of water-boarding on suspected terrorists (which current CIA director and fellow Democrat Leon Panetta swiftly rebuked) and, then, fumbled her way through a disastrous press conference during which she: read from, departed from, and then misplaced her prepared statement, tried leaving the room only to be forced back to the podium to answer more shouted questions from an increasingly agitated press corps until, mercifully, her press aides ushered her out again. It was a meltdown unrivaled since Dorothy unloaded a bucket of water on the wicked Witch of the West. And, of course, the entire unfortunate performance now burns eternally in the video hell of YouTube.

But beyond the pure entertainment value of government-leaders-under-fire, what can we learn from the respective media performances of these embattled officials?

If I were to pick one lesson, it would be this: You can't explain things when you're under fire. When New Orleans was 10 feet below water and thousands were left homeless, the public didn't want Michael Brown explaining why it was taking so long for the federal government to respond. With the international credit system on life-support, the public wanted action and reassurance, not Secretary Geithner's stilted explanations of his "stress test" and bank bailout plan. If the person third in line for the Presidency is going to accuse the nation's leading security agency of misleading Congress "every step of the way," she better be prepared to bring it, because her shifting explanations of what-did-she-know-and-when-did-she-know-it will only inflame the press.

Each of these officials was essentially facing a fight-or-flight situation. Confronting intense scrutiny, they could have either claimed the moral high-ground, stayed on offense and delivered action-oriented messages, or do what the Speaker eventually did: get out of town. Instead, at her press conference, Speaker Pelosi chose a catastrophic middle approach, which was to try to hide behind a brief, highly parsed statement in a forum where that just doesn't work. The lesson here is when you're caught in a jam you can either come out swinging, or explain how you're fixing the problem. Unless, in the Speaker's case, you can arrange a quick trip to China.