Last Wednesday the Chicago Tribune reported that the top-ranking officials in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had almost no experience in emergency management before they were hired.
Michael Brown was the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association before he became the head of FEMA in 2001. The two men directly below him worked as advance travel planners and event coordinators for President Bush before heading to FEMA—neither had any experience working in disaster management.
In light of recent events, this information raises some obvious questions. One has to wonder: What if it was this easy for everyone to move to a more exciting career without any qualifications? Would UB President John Simpson move from higher education to missile defense? Could Flava Flav become an open-heart surgeon? Could I finally assume my post as Buffalo’s answer to Yakov Smirnoff (“In South Buffalo, Metro rails you!”)?
Well, at least now FEMA’s top brass is getting some hands-on training. It took four days for the federal government to respond to Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin estimates his city’s death toll will number in the thousands. Within days of Katrina’s landfall the Big Easy had descended into lawless chaos worthy of a Mad Max movie. Still, Bush said Brown was doing “a heck of a good job.”
Really? At what? Gelding Funny Cide? Fluffing Bill O’Reilly? They sent Brown packing last Friday after he responded to the most devastating natural disaster in American history with a bureaucratic mess that would have embarrassed his equivalent from the former Soviet Union, if they had one. (“In Soviet Russia, emergency manages you!”)
As incompetent as Brown appears to have been, the real blame rests in a familiar place: squarely on the shoulders of President Bush. To be clear, I’m not blaming him for the hurricane. I blame Bush for the decisions he made years ago that everybody knew were fucking banoodles, but at the time he just sort of shrugged, laughed it off, and proceeded to ignore any inclination of his own wrongdoing.
From day one Bush played Club President, appointing his best friends and closest political allies to top positions in government so he’d have someone to nudge at state functions when Condi Rice walked by in a tight-fitting pant-suit.
Do you believe in an industry’s fundamental “right to pollute”? Congratulations, you’re the new Secretary of the Interior. What’s that? You lost your congressional election to a corpse…but you hate civil liberties? Well, Attorney General it is.
These used to be jokes. For years, it was easy for comedians and members of the Liberal Jew-Fag Media Alliance (LJFMA) to make snide comments or even (gasp!) accurate observations about the unqualified hacks Bush brought into his treehouse—and it was even easier for the administration to shrug it off as partisan bile.
Now we have a body count. Now we have real lives lost because the president thought it would be a good move to appoint men who had no experience in disaster relief to the positions in charge of American disaster relief.
We all made jokes about the president when he first took office: the penchant for cowboy imagery, the casual acquaintance with the English language, the look of genuine surprise on his face when a reporter asked him a difficult question. What is becoming harder to laugh at is his utter detachment from the reality of his own actions in office and any consequences they might have.
But hey, at least we’re making progress in Iraq: the current draft of the Iraqi constitution actually gives women fewer rights than they had under Saddam. Finally.
-JD
