Heck of a Book, Brownie - Bush’s FEMA director makes his case.

The Weekly Standard ^ | June 20, 2011 | Michael Warren

[re_tail20]

Michael D. Brown says he got a bad rap. With the statement, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” on September 2, 2005, George W. Bush made Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the name and face of governmental incompetence after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast. Ten days later, Brown resigned.

The media were brutal. Newspaper editorials after Katrina excoriated a “self-serving” Brown for his “failures.” The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd called him a “blithering idiot.” A team of eight reporters from Time magazine asked the question, “How reliable is Brown’s résumé?” (Time’s answer: Not that reliable.)

Now, nearly six years after Katrina, Brown is attempting to save his name. In a new memoir, Deadly Indifference, Brown struggles to tell his side of the story. Clearly, he sees himself playing a major role in the Katrina drama. Here’s how his second chapter opens:

In August 2005 I became the third most powerful person in the country confronting the impending disaster of Hurricane Katrina, a storm that would take hundreds of lives and destroy most of one of the great cities in the nation.

It’s an odd assertion, considering Brown spends a lot of time talking about how powerless he was to put things right. For Brown, the source of many of his problems was Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, the former federal judge who replaced Tom Ridge in the job.

Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, understood emergency management, Brown said in a phone interview. But under Chertoff, he continued, the whole response to Katrina was micromanaged. “I would tell a parish president, for example, ‘We can do this or we can’t do this,’ and that would get overruled back in D.C. by Chertoff,” he said.

[cripplecreek]

I don’t blame Brown. FEMA is nothing but another tax sucking entitlement anyway. Better to have local civil defense volunteers on scene as disasters happen so they can act within minutes rather than hours or days.

[Terry Mross]

I see the W administration, including W, as more and more inept every day.

[piytar]

Meanwhile, obastard’s administation is ignoring massive wildfire damage in West Texas and his people on the ground in Oklahoma are saying that houses leveled to the ground aren’t damaged “sufficiently” to qualify for federal assistance. Why? Because TX and OK didn’t vote for obastard.

And the LSM says nothing...

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

I actually believe that Brown was in a no-win situation during Katrina. Chertoff was/is a hack, TSA was/is more concerned about its procedures than employing common sense, and the state and local first response was indeed pitifully incompetent. And Bush and Rove refused to fight back against Blanco and Nagin’s media finger pointing.

[Ratman83]

The feds can do nothing until asked to by the states, the state did not ask right away.

On a different note FEMA and most fed agencies are unconstitutional anyways.

[volunbeer]

Agree. Brown became the scapegoat that made Bush look bad and the media ran with it. FEMA was not designed, nor did it function, to be the first responder agency prior to Katrina. The media attacked Brown to drag Bush down in the hysterical news coverage of Katrina. That was their first goal - attack Bush. By attacking FEMA and then the Corps of Engineers they also diverted analysis of the incompetent/corrupt local leadership (all Dem) in Louisiana as well as the failure of the welfare state to create citizens who could help themselves.

[fremont_steve]

Oddly enough -it looks like the voters of Louisiana figured something out. The Dems aren’t in charge of the state anymore. The response to the Oil Spill by the state looked energized and frustrated at the ineptitude of the Federal government instead of part of the same problem.

[cruise_missile]

Michael Brown has a local talk show here in Denver. One of the better talk shows.

FYI. Brown was FEMA director during 9/11.

What happened after Katrina was that it exposed how ineffectual the government was. What a surprise!

But more importantly, people stood around expecting the guv’ment to rescue them. When there were over a hundred buses a mile a way from the stadium.

The press went after their bad conservative and it was Brown. Saul Alinsky: cut off the support network and isolate the target.

[volunbeer]

Too bad the folks in New Orleans kept the same clowns in charge but they definitely upgraded the Governor!