Bush: I'll have all the Brownies I want

Just got these postcards in the mail the other day from the aforementioned Xpress Your View. I love it. For those of you who don't remember, Bush's response to Katrina was inexplicably slow; he was vacationing on his non-working ranch in Crawford, Texas when Katrina hit. However, when the Schiavo controversy came to a head, he hopped on Air Force One and flew back to Washington almost immediately to intervene. Pretty telling about where this president's priorities have been.

Anyway, a little bit ago on Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer had a good point about FEMA and Katrina. I'll comment after the video clip below...



So, Congress got some balls recently and told the president that all future FEMA directors have to have at least five years of emergency management experience, and Bush thumbed his nose at Congress.

I can understand Bush's quandary on this one - the president should have the power to pick his own people, but the president shouldn't have the ability to pick completely incompetent people. Part of the problem here is that I don't believe FEMA director requires Congressional approval. Since FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA director is no longer a cabinet-level position (President Clinton raised FEMA director to a cabinet level position in 1993). If Congress feels that strongly about it (and it should, in the wake of Katrina and the government's disastrous handling of it), then it should pass a law requiring Congressional approval of the FEMA director. That way, if Bush or any future president doesn't want to meet a Congressional mandate that the head of FEMA should have X number of years of experience, simply don't confirm him or her.

I can see Bush's point here, but honestly, the public good should override these concerns. FEMA director has historically been a patronage job - a place where a president could give someone a decent paying job for having been a good supporter. But, Katrina changed all of that. We can never have another "Brownie" (former FEMA Director Michael D. Brown) on the job. (Everyone remembers the "Heck of a job, Brownie, heck of a job" crack by President Bush, who had no goddamn clue what was happening on the Gulf Coast when he said it.)

With global warming arguably causing many more super hurricanes, we need someone who can quickly mobilize an effective government response not only to hurricanes, but to all disasters, both man-made and natural.