Katrina: Advance Men in Charge
Advance Men in Charge
Published: September 9, 2005
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it didn't want the news media taking photographs of the dead in New Orleans. A FEMA spokeswoman talked unconvincingly about the dignity of the dead. But the bizarre demand, a creepy echo of the ban on news media coverage of the coffins returning from Iraq, is simply the latest spasm of a gutted federal agency.
It's not really all that surprising that the officials who run FEMA are stressing that all-important emergency response function: the public relations campaign. As it turns out, that's all they really have experience at doing.
Michael Brown was made the director after he was asked to resign from the International Arabian Horse Association, and the other top officials at FEMA don't exactly have impressive résumés in emergency management either. The Chicago Tribune reported on Wednesday that neither the acting deputy director, Patrick Rhode, nor the acting deputy chief of staff, Brooks Altshuler, came to FEMA with any previous experience in disaster management. Ditto for Scott Morris, the third in command until May.
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It should not be lost on folks that the same administration whose falacious judgement took us to war on the basis of completely erroneous intelligence is also the same administration that hired these idiots. The same President who failed to plan for a protracted insurgency in Iraq was playng golf while a million Americans were made homeless.
This nation is being run by a gaggle of buffoons. Unfortunately the people of this nation pay for this incompetence with their lives.