 What if Michael Brown wasn't lying when he said he tried to warn his superiors, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and a then-vacationing President Bush, about the possible devastating coming the Gulf Coast's way via Hurricane Katrina? (One he was apparently told could be bigger than Hurricane Andrew, which did in his father's political career...) What if we've been scapegoating the wrong abject failure in this case, pinning the disaster mostly on the guy to the left of this photo rather than the guy to the right?
We didn't need this new video to understand that FEMA failed in its response to Katrina's devastation of parts of Louisiana and Mississippi (Haley Barbour's good soldiering for the president notwithstanding). But it's becoming increasingly clear that Michael Brown, far from a complete screw-up, made at least some effort to get his superiors to grasp the seriousness of the events to come, as did the go-to guy on storms, Max Mayfield of Miami's National Hurricane Center. (Brown apparently now is approaching a feeling of vindication... but why he didn't follow up with preplacement of emergency supplies, trailers and a plan, he doesn't say. And once the storm hit, Brown apparently began a long, wierd mental vacation...) But signs increasngly point to Chertoff as the bigger villain in the Katrina tragedy, and of the president as at best, absent minded...
Not that any of this will sway the dwindling cadre of die-hard Bushies, who apparently can find nothing that the president could do (or fail to do) that would cost him their absolute, prostrate allegiance. It's a bit sad, really, the way they hang on to the man...
Anyway, Paul at Wizbang schools those of us in the reality based community on the fine points of difference between "breaching," "topping," "Warning" and "briefing," and how those differences clearly get the president off the hook. Says Paul, who lives in New Orleans, btw:
Isn't Bush getting briefings on the storm a good thing? What would the media response be if Bush and NOT gotten any briefings before the storm? Isn't 6 days of video tape proof he was taking this seriously? Well, this might be proof that Mr. Bush was being seriously briefed... (though he simply listened to what was being said, asked no questions, and then mouthed some platitudes about being "ready to go...")
...but this is what your "serious" president was doing a day or so later. Taking it serioiusly? You be the judge...
The bottom line is that FEMA clearly failed, and is continuing to fail, the people of the Gulf Coast. But they didn't fail alone. And the idea that those who FEMA answers to had no way of anticipating the horrors Katrina could visit on three American states is clearly erroneous...
Refreshers: Tags: Katrina, New Orleans, Hurricane, government |
