Advance Men in Charge – New York Times

Political patronage has always been a hallmark of Washington life. But President Bill Clinton appointed political pals at FEMA who

actually knew something about disaster management. The former FEMA director James Lee Witt, whose tenure is widely considered a major

success, was a friend of Mr. Clinton’s when he took office in 1993, but he had run the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services. His top

staff came from regional FEMA offices.

Surely there are loyal Republicans among the 50 directors of state emergency services. But

President Bush chose to make FEMA a dumping ground for unqualified cronies – a sure sign that he wanted to hasten the degradation of an

agency that conservative Republicans have long considered an evil of big government. Katrina has proved that federal disaster help is

vital, and that Mr. Brown and his team of advance men can’t do the job. What America needs are federal disaster relief people who

actually know something about disaster relief.

Point Those Fingers – New York Times By

PAUL KRUGMAN

The administration followed the same principles in staffing FEMA. The agency had become a highly professional

organization during the Clinton years, but under Mr. Bush it reverted to its former status as a “turkey farm,” a source of patronage

jobs.

As Bloomberg News puts it, the agency’s “upper ranks are mostly staffed with people who share two traits: loyalty to

President George W. Bush and little or no background in emergency management.” By now everyone knows FEMA’s current head went from

overseeing horse shows to overseeing the nation’s response to disaster, with no obvious qualifications other than the fact that he was

Mr. Allbaugh’s college roommate.

All that’s missing from the Katrina story is an expensive reconstruction effort, with lucrative

deals for politically connected companies, that fails to deliver essential services. But give it time – they’re working on that, too.

Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time. …

Will this be

enough to let the administration get away with another failure? Let’s hope not: if the administration isn’t held accountable for what

just happened, it will keep repeating its mistakes. Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff will receive presidential medals, and the next

disaster will be even worse.

Osama and Katrina – New York Times By THOMAS

L. FRIEDMAN

And then there are the president’s standard lines: “It’s not the government’s money; it’s your money,” and, “One

of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government.” Maybe Mr. Bush will now

also tell us: “It’s not the government’s hurricane – it’s your hurricane.”

An administration whose tax policy has been

dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist – who has been quoted as saying: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want

to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” – doesn’t have the instincts for this

moment. …

The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be

another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn’t

happen on Mr. Bush’s watch – that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.