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"Brownie, You're Doing a Heck of a Job"

Gilliard:

FEMA is now a dumping ground for political hacks with zero imagination. To this day, it's the Army saving lives and FEMA is missing in action. The military could have used the resources they use around the world, that Americans pay for, to save Americans. But no one in FEMA had enough sense to ask about air drops, pathfinders, Special Tactics Teams or anything which could have sent immediate aid. Instead, they start and stop their bus evacuation, letting disease fester and leaving the question of racial indifference hang in the air.

Maureen Dowd:

Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.

(snip)

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

AP:

The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.

As New Orleans descended into anarchy, top Bush administration officials congratulated each other for jobs well done and spoke of water, food and troops pouring into the ravaged city. Television pictures told a different story.

Billmon:

Two key U.S. senators said on Friday they will launch a bipartisan coverup of what they described as an "immense, but probably unavoidable failure" of the government response to Hurricane Katrina.

(snip)

Speaker of the House Denny Hastert declined to comment on the hurricane or the proposed Senate investigation, other than to make a loud "BRRRRRRRR" sound while pushing a toy bulldozer across a map of New Orleans.

And god help us, the fog cleared briefly and even Bobo Brooks had a moment of clarity:

I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, over at the NRO, they're eating the lead-based paint off the walls again. James S. Robbins says, "It is hard to understand what more should, or realistically could have been done up to this point."

The knee-jerk Bush apologists really have their work cut out for them these days, don't they?

Get to it, you bastards.

posted by Jane Hamsher @ 9/03/2005 01:50:00 PM