MORE GROTESQUE BUSH REGIME INCOMPETENCE-- AND MORE PEOPLE DIE

Yesterday I was driving home listening to NPR and they were interviewing the head of FEMA. He was insisting, very aggressively, that the job being done in New Orleans was not just adequate but that it was the best job ever done anywhere on anything. I waited for a punchline. None came. My mind flashed to the hopeless scenes playing out on my TV screen 24/7 and the sense of horror that every single American but George Bush and those around him seems to share about this unmitigated catastrophe and the abysmal response to it from our government-- before, during and after. Was this just more right-wing bluster, more Goebbels-Limbaughesque propaganda where the Big Lie redefines reality in the popular collective consciousness? If that's the attempt, it can't work, not with those TV cameras focussed on this thing so intently, not with the whole nation, the whole world, looking on so avidly and in such a state of dismay and growing anger.

Today Brett Arends wrote an article for the BOSTON GLOBE titled "Brown pushed from last job: Horse group: 'FEMA chief had to be `asked to resign'" and it goes a long way in explaining what I heard on NPR yesterday. According to the GLOBE story "the federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows." Brown, a GOP hack activist and fundraiser had no experience whatsoever to qualify him for a job like this. He was handed the job by one of Bush's closest (and most corrupt) associates, a Joseph Allbaugh (himself the head of FEMA before resigning to help run Bush's re-election bid, and now heading up a division of Halliburton that has been awarded massive contracts to work on New Orleans). Allbaugh and Brown were roommates in Oklahoma. Brown has been in charge since 2003 and, the GLOBE points out, "is now at the center of a growing fury over the handling of the New Orleans disaster. 'I look at FEMA and I shake my head,' said a furious Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday, calling the response 'an embarrassment.'" Even Bush, in a rare moment of candor, after seeing the devastation up close yesterday, said he wasn't satisfied with the response.

"Brown - formerly an estates and family lawyer - this week has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center. Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.
'We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. 'This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,' she added. Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures. 'He was asked to resign,' Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night."