Ernest Dumas at the Arkansas Times wonders if this was willful ineptitude:
There may indeed be method in Bush’s madness. The time-tested way to get rid of an unwanted program is to put an incompetent in charge of it. Bush had downgraded FEMA. Disaster relief is a job for state and local governments, not the federal government, he said. Never mind that a state or a city, in a disaster as cataclysmic as Katrina, cannot requisition the forces to do the job like FEMA is empowered to do, especially if a third of the state’s militia, including those trained for such duty, is fighting in Iraq. Over the weekend, he was blaming state and local governments for the failings that fed and compounded the suffering.
Dumas also points out this lovely tidbit:
The bungling had been so bad after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that Floridians voted in Bill Clinton. Recalling that, the younger Bush had FEMA take extra precautions to prevent its recurrence during the hurricane and election season of 2004. The agency flung billions of dollars around Florida after Hurricane Frances and other storms. The Florida Sun-Sentinel reported this spring that FEMA had paid for the funerals of 319 people in Florida in the fall, although only a few of the deaths had anything even remotely to do with the hurricanes. One was for the funeral of a millionaire supporter of Bush at Palm Beach Gardens, who died of complications from heart surgery two days before Hurricane Frances. Another died of cirrhosis five months after Hurricane Charley. Thanks to George Bush, you picked up the funeral tabs.
Defend THAT.
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