Posted on 11/03/2005 9:16:09 AM PST by kemathen7
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As Hurricane Katrina ripped into the Gulf Coast, the government's emergency management chief was making flippant remarks about his responsibilities, e-mails show.
"Can I quit now? Can I come home?" former Federal Emergency Management Director Michael Brown wrote to Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs, the morning of the hurricane.
A few days later, Brown wrote to an acquaintance, "I'm trapped now, please rescue me."
As employees looked for direction and support on the ravaged Gulf Coast, Brown offered to "tweak" the federal response.
Brown resigned on September 12, 10 days after President Bush told him, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Brown took over FEMA in 2003 with little experience in emergency management. He joined the agency in 2001 as legal counsel to his college friend, then-FEMA director Joe Allbaugh, who was Bush's 2000 campaign manager. When Allbaugh left FEMA in 2003 Brown assumed the top job.
Before joining the Bush administration, Brown spent a decade as the stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
The e-mails were obtained by Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Louisiana, and posted on his Web site.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I just saw this story and was going to post it myself. This guy is appalling...very Clinton-esque.
Wow, that had to be grueling.
As much as I detest the "where was FEMA" rhetoric, Mike Brown was the wrong dude at the wrong time.
I agree that he was the wrong man at the wrong time, but isn't Congress acting in its typical way? They find a bogeyman and lay all of the blame on him. Instead of a serious inquiry as to what went wrong at all levels of government, they play up the errors of this guy and don't consider anything else. Result: nothing is corrected, no one other than Brown gets any blame, and the next time a hurricane comes along, same problems.
I thought the same thing. But I can see how the Arabian horses and FEMA have a lot in common. /sarc
I would hope to God that no one ever reads my e-mail and tries to infer anything from it.
I guess Mike Brown is the only one of us who engages in a little gallows humor among collegues?
How about we get a look at the e-mails sent by Blanco and Nagin? I'm sure they would be very enlightening, as well.
Okay some of those are pretty bad. Taken out of context perhaps, but still pretty bad. I think its clear Brown should never have had the job in the first place. You want to give someone a patronage job, then make them ambassador to some tiny country, don't put them in charge of our nation's disaster relief. Katrina was a failure at all levels of government. Blano, and Nagin deserve the majority of the blame IMO, but Brown deserves to be blamed for FEMA's slow and disorganized response too. I honestly though wasn't surprised by what I saw out of FEMA and DHS. As a rule, I don't trust big government bureaucracies (with the exception of the military) to move very quickly or to move very coherently.
How about we get a look at the e-mails sent by Blanco and Nagin? I'm sure they would be very enlightening, as well.
Nothing like lifting statements completely out of context.
what makes you think they were out of context?
I'm sure Nagin's hard drive was "destroyed" by the floods ;)
That's the point - we don't know without it.
But given the fact that context was not provided, methinks context does convey the desired impression - otherwise, it would have been provided.
>>>As much as I detest the "where was FEMA" rhetoric, Mike Brown was the wrong dude at the wrong time.<<<
Brown had successfully handled 164 federally declared disasters as FEMA director, including several major hurricanes and the California wildfires. My question is, who was the right dude?
I still maintain that Brown got a bad rap. He merely became a scapegoat. Nobody was complaining about Brown last year when four major hurricanes swept through Florida. Things seemed to work as planned in Mississippi and Alabama.
If anything... once the blame game started, he stood up to catch the arrows. Once he bailed out, the blame game ~did~ settle down a bit and the real work could go on. He took one for the team, at first anyway, but his book ought to be a fun read. :-)
"How about we get a look at the e-mails sent by Blanco and Nagin? I'm sure they would be very enlightening, as well."
LOL!! Right, like that's gonna happen. Good post, though.
This whole article is ridiculous. Haven't you ever sent a smartass email? Mike Brown did a fine job in Florida a year before where a competent Governor is in place and only failed when he had to deal with the monumental corruption, malfeasance and incompetence that marks Louisiana's state and local government.
Do you really think that with all of their resources, what we saw was the best the federal government could do? If thats the case then heaven help us if a follower of the religion of peace ever sets off a dirty bomb in a major city.
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