Amidst charges and calls for resignation, FEMA's Brown sent to showers
In a typical effort to limit political damage while doing nothing about the problem, the administration has decided to send FEMA director Michael Brown back to DC. By effectively hiding him in a closet, they remove a person who has become the most prominent symbol for criticism of both the disasterous reponse and Bush's puting political cronyism ahead of putting competent and qualified people in charge of helping American citizens in times of devastation.
Homeland Security chief Chertoff announced that Brown will continue to be FEMA chief, but will be sent back to D.C. because there are other potential threats out there, both natural and man-made, and well, they want him to go sit on the bench and, I don't know... ponder those, I guess.
At any rate, they've come up with a way to essentially get rid of Brown without getting rid of him.
Vice Admiral Thad Allen will be put in charge of the overall relief area.
FEMA head Brown has not only been rocked by his incompetence in the intitial response to the disaster, but by the revelation that he had only a glancing experience with disaster relief and was an entirely unqualified person put in his position by Bush due to nothing more than political cronyism.
Brown has also been embarrasssed by recent reports by Time Magazine charging that portions of Brown's bio listed on the FindLaw website were utterly false.
posted by The Inside Dope @ 9/09/2005
2 comments
2 Comments:
Earth to Lefty-World...
I know the default reaction these days is to blame Bush, but can you really ignore the facts in this case?
Bush disclaimer: I have several complaints with Bush leadership. The opinions stated here are not coming from right-wing cronyism.
Lets list the errors:
Bush - Appointing Brown.
Congress - Confirming Brown.
Brown - Being slow and incompetent.
Blanco - not allowing Red Cross aid into New Orleans, waiting days to declare marshal law, and slow to deploy states national guard.
Ray Nagin - waiting two days to issue evacuation, leting 200+ buses go un-used, hosting 1000's in the Superdome without stocking food for 1000's and having security for 1000's, spending levee money on casinos, not following preset disaster plans.
Now, did you expect Bush himself to have looked-after and carried-out all these details. You have a dozen posts on the subject all focusing on Fema and Bush.
All I ask for is a logical analysis.
You make a reasonable request. But the fact remains that there is not much factual stories emerging about local officials other than those you mention.
I've never suggested that city and state officials were blameless, so I'm not sure what you want to see here.
The fact remains that Bush appointed some political hack for a position of great importance and many people paid for it with their lives and losing everything they had.
If your house was nothing but a foundation and your grandmother drowned in her home waiting for aid, would you put some blame on Bush, knowing all we now know?
The reason I feel Bush and the Feds are the prime story here is for many many reasons. City and State officials weren't the ones who have agressively tried to dismantle every government programs they could get their hands on, BUSH WAS.
City and State officials weren't the ones that decided to divert billions of dollars to a fruitless invasion of Iraq, thereby cutting critical disaster prevention programs, BUSH WAS.
City and State officials didn't daly on vaction for at least 48 hours after the scope of the disaster was well known, BUSH DID.
Certainly, the governor of Louisiana and Mayor Nagin could have done things differently. It's hard to say at the moment if they were guilty of not taking the storm seriously enough, but the fact that they both called for the total evacuation of New Orleans suggests that they did grasp the situation.
There have been differing reports on whether the Mayor could have utilized school and city busses to get more of those unable to leave on their own out of the city. But with only 24 hours notice and many of them not wanting to leave no matter what, it's hard to say if that effort would have made a difference.
We also don't know what resources were available to Nagin, if there were enough drivers for the busses, etc.
This will all come out in time, I'm sure.
But the fact remains that this situation was far, far, FAR beyond the ability of any city or any state to manage alone, and the feds should have seen that coming and had things in place, at least much better than they did.
And here's the bottom line. Under Clinton, FEMA was elevated to a cabinet position under James Lee Witt, who turned FEMA into one of the best, most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.
As soon as Bush was elected, he removed FEMA from the cabinet, and then in the process of creating the largest expansion of bureaucracy since WWII, decided to subsume FEMA into the Dept. Of Homeland Security, thus further eroding FEMAs effectiveness and increasing the layers of red tape and chain of command enormously, resulting in the paralysis we all witnessed.
Yes, Bush is responsible for all this, unless you want to admit that he's not a leader at all, and therefore isn't accountible for everything that happens under his watch.
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