Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Suffering beyond comparison
I wrote a brief blog post about Hurricane Katrina on 8/29/05. I'd been up late the night before watching news reports & weather radar. Although the Gulf Coast had suffered a terrible blow, the full picture of the destruction hadn't emerged yet. But tt looked like New Orleans had escaped a catastrophe. We know what happened then, when the levees broke & couldn't be plugged up.
Even a competently managed FEMA wouldn't have been adequate for the task. But few Americans in 2005 realized Bush had done with that agency what he'd done with so much of the federal government; staffed it with incompetent cronies & then ignored it. It was another example of the Repug strategy to prove that government doesn't work by providing poor government. Yet, FEMA was one federal agency Americans wanted & expected to be professionally administered, generously funded, & to maintain a high level of preparedness. Bill Clinton reformed it when he took office in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, elevating it to a cabinet level position & appointing as director a friend from Arkansas who also happened to be superbly qualified for the job. Bubble Boy gutted Clinton's reforms & made FEMA so inept that people were calling for it to be abolished after Michael "Brownie" Brown did a "Heck of a job." Mission accomplished. In a way FEMA was already gone, incorporated into the Dept. Of Homeland Security, tucked inside a new super-bureaucracy where the White House wouldn't have to pay any attention to it. The result was human suffering & waste of money beyond comparison, if we don't compare Hurricane Katrina with Iraq.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Even a competently managed FEMA wouldn't have been adequate for the task. But few Americans in 2005 realized Bush had done with that agency what he'd done with so much of the federal government; staffed it with incompetent cronies & then ignored it. It was another example of the Repug strategy to prove that government doesn't work by providing poor government. Yet, FEMA was one federal agency Americans wanted & expected to be professionally administered, generously funded, & to maintain a high level of preparedness. Bill Clinton reformed it when he took office in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, elevating it to a cabinet level position & appointing as director a friend from Arkansas who also happened to be superbly qualified for the job. Bubble Boy gutted Clinton's reforms & made FEMA so inept that people were calling for it to be abolished after Michael "Brownie" Brown did a "Heck of a job." Mission accomplished. In a way FEMA was already gone, incorporated into the Dept. Of Homeland Security, tucked inside a new super-bureaucracy where the White House wouldn't have to pay any attention to it. The result was human suffering & waste of money beyond comparison, if we don't compare Hurricane Katrina with Iraq.
