FEMA Head Knows Horseshit, But What Else?
The New Orleans Times-Picayune has called for FEMA to get the hell out of their city, and for Bush to fire FEMA Director Mike Brown and all of his blunderlings. One thing we know is that Brown knows shit from Shinola, based on his past employment as the head of the International Arabian Horse Association, where he got into so much horseshit they fired his ass. Now he can swim in shit up to his eyeballs and not notice.
FEMA head takes heat in spotlight
By John Biemer and Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune staff reporters
Published September 4, 2005
For the decade prior to joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Director Michael Brown was commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, a Colorado-based group that organizes breeders and horse shows. Then he was asked to resign.
“He didn't follow the instructions he was given,” then-IAHA President William Pennington confirmed Saturday.
Less than five years after that dismissal, Brown, 50, finds himself heading the federal agency charged with responding to one of the nation's worst disasters.
Brown has been one of the leading public faces of a federal response sharply criticized as too little and too late. His statements and sometimes even his demeanor under the camera's glare have been questioned by critics--and often divergent from the grief-stricken reality on the ground.
During one of his first televised news conferences Wednesday, when violence and chaos were spreading in New Orleans and bodies were beginning to be seen floating in the water, Brown laughed and joked as he took reporters' questions.
At points last week, he described security in New Orleans as “pretty darn good.” He said he had received no reports of “unrest,” nor any information about uncollected corpses. And on Thursday night, he told CNN the agency had just learned that thousands of people had huddled at the New Orleans Convention Center, even though the city had directed them to go there, and journalists had been reporting their plight.
The frustrated New Orleans mayor, C. Ray Nagin, lashed out last week, saying federal officials “don't have a clue” what was going on in his city. And the top Democrat on the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, was quoted in The New York Times as calling on President Bush to fire Brown.
Seeking her own expert, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco on Saturday hired James Lee Witt, the widely praised FEMA director under President Bill Clinton, to advise her.
Still, even though Bush has called the federal response to the disaster “not acceptable,” he praised Brown Friday during a tour of Alabama, saying, “Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,” the AP reported.