A Pilgrim’s Digression

Brown shrilly defends FEMA, spreads blame

The Bush Administration ought to keep Michael Brown on the payroll. He makes an excellent scapegoat. If you’re George Bush, keeping Brown on staff at the very least provides a much needed humorous distraction from your own ineptitude. How often do reporters get to attach the following tag to a high-ranking Administration official: “Brown, a lawyer and former commissioner of an Arabian horse association…” This guy was born to be the butt of late night monologues.

When you learn that someone like Brown is coming to Washington to testify before Congress you expect that he will be appropriately contrite for mistakes even the President lays at his feet.

There was no contrition in Michael Brown’s testimony yesterday. During the course of the day, I read some of his statements. Out of all the mistakes that piled upon mistake in those days after Katrina, the only ones he takes responsibility for are: doing too many interviews and not enough “media briefings” (I’m not sure I understand the difference), and not being able to bridge the divide between the Louisiana Governor and the New Orleans mayor. Everything else, it was all local officials’ faults.

Seeing his performance on television last night was an entirely different experience than just reading his words. His angry statement, “So I guess you want me to be the superhero, to step in there and take everyone out of New Orleans” made for some priceless TV. As a Boston Globe editorialist said yesterday, “Former FEMA Director Michael Brown forgot the first rule of holes: you know, when you’re in one, stop digging.”

What might have been missed in Brown’s testimony yesterday was that he didn’t just blame Louisiana officials for the bungled response to the hurricane. He also blamed Michael Chertoff, saying that “officials at Homeland Security, the only Cabinet department allowed to transfer funds among its own agencies without congressional approval, routinely took money from the agency. He estimated that over the past three years, $77.9 million was taken from the disaster agency for other departmental programs” (San Francisco Chronicle, The Blame Game).

He also blamed the President, saying that he had told the President and his chief advisors that “this is going to be a bad one” several days before the storm hit. The implication Brown makes is that the President ignored his dire predictions of a debacle.

Brown is really an incredible piece of work, a God send for the Democrats and Republicans both, really. Everyone can find something about Michael Brown to use and abuse. On the radio this morning, the Conservative morning crew on WMAL, Andy Parks and Fred Grandy (former actor on “The Love Boat” turned Congressman turned talk show host) both said they now had great respect for Brown because he had stood up to Congress and told them what for. No doubt other Conservative opinion makers will feel the same as well. Ever since the disaster, they have been trying to pin the blame on local and state officials anyway. Brown just helps them make their case.

Unfortunately, there is seemingly no one in this country who can lead us out of this wilderness of ideological madness we find ourselves in today. The Government charged with protecting us in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster proves itself totally inept, and yet people from the President on down to his buddy Brownie continue on with their petty game of blaming the opposition political party and its supporters. Democrats aren’t any better. Without doubt Blanco and Nagin were incompetent to deal with the natural disaster that struck New Orleans. They have no high horse on which to ride above the fray, claiming innocently, as Nagin did yesterday, that they don’t know what Brown is talking about when he says the governor and mayor were unable to coordinate an effective evacuation of the city. We know they were all incompetent; we saw all of their incompetence on TV, from Bush to Brown, to Nagin and Blanco. The only people who are still pretending like they saw members of “their” political party do nothing wrong are the die-hard partisans who are tearing this country apart at the seams.