I actually have some sympathy for Mike Brown. By all accounts, he meant well. He simply wasn’t qualified to serve as the director of FEMA. He was an attorney and a judge of horse shows; he had no experience running an organization whose job was to help Americans in our most desperate times.
No, I don’t blame Mike Brown for failing after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast; he couldn’t possibly have been expected to do otherwise. But the man who appointed him to the position — George W. Bush — he, I blame.
Bush not only selected an unqualified fool to serve in a critical position — one that, lest we forget, would be responsible for cleaning up a dirty bomb attack in New York, or a ricin attack in Chicago — but after the scale of human suffering became apparent, Bush praised him, as only Bush could:
Now, this was days after Katrina hit. This was at a time when we knew damn well that our government had failed to adequately prepare for the disaster, at a time when the newsmedia appeared to be able to get into New Orleans, but FEMA was stymied. And Bush praised that failing effort, because…well, what else would he do? Bush doesn’t admit defeat, and he doesn’t admit failure. Not finding WMDs in Iraq? That’s a “disappointment,” not a “failure.”
Ultimately, the anger at FEMA’s failure got loud enough that Bush did fire Brown — from a direct role supervising the Katrina recovery effort. But Brown stayed on in Washington for several weeks more as head of FEMA, as if nobody would notice. And while Brown would ultimately be defenestrated, his boss, Michael Chertoff, stayed on. And of course, Chertoff’s boss stayed on, too. Heckuva job, guys. Heckuva job.
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