Brendan Loy: FEMA Head Either A Clueless Idiot Or Shameless Liar

[NATO AIR]

from the bloggers who's been on point in nailing everybody from Mayor Nagin to the LO governor... now he takes on FEMA's head.
I think the FEMA head (and the homeland security czar) are a lot of both liar and idiot, along with shameless opportunist to boot.
(by the way, notice the link at the bottom to Michelle Malkin's blog, she tells Pres. Bush- "fire mike brown")

http://www.brendanloy.com/2005/09/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me.html

Now this is just absolutely unbelievable:

"Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation -- not to say it wasn't going to be bad, but that the water would drain away fairly quickly," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown said today. "Then the levees broke and (we had) this lawlessness. That almost stopped our efforts." ...

"Katrina was much larger than we expected," he said.
Ladies and gentlemen, the man who is in charge of our nation's disaster relief efforts is either a clueless idiot or a shameless liar.

I am so angry, I am shaking as I write this, and I find myself almost at a loss for words. Instead of writing out rational thoughts, I'd rather just scream my head off. There are so many insults I want to hurl at this buffoon, so many utterly obvious points I want to make that definitively prove what a complete asshat he is, I don't know where to begin. But let me try.

No one -- NO ONE -- who knows anything about New Orleans's geography and topography and levee system would ever have thought for a single moment on Saturday and Sunday that Katrina, if it followed the predicted path, was going to be a "typical hurricane situation." Jesus Christ!! For how many years now has this article been out there?!? And this one? And many more like them? Did Michael Brown never read them? Was he not familiar with the science? Was FEMA's director unaware of what has been acknowledged for many years as the #1 most serious natural disaster threat in all of America?!? (Or, more immediately, did he not read the National Weather Service's statement on Sunday morning which predicted that Katrina would cause "human suffering incredible by modern standards"?)

If the braintrust running this country really thought that "the water would drain away fairly quickly" after a direct hit on New Orleans from a major hurricane, then my God, our country is run by the most absolutely incompetent bunch of nitwits imaginable. The city is below sea level. Once it floods, there is nowhere for the water to "drain away" to! Everyone knows this!!!

Wasn't the government studying this stuff? Didn't they have all sorts of "war games" and disaster drills, because they had been told by the scientists that the exact scenario that was being predicted on Saturday and Sunday would produce a catastrophic, months-long flood in New Orleans? So what the FUCK is Michael Brown talking about? (I'm sorry, I don't swear on my blog very often, but this is just absolutely fucking ridiculous.)

And "larger than expected"?!? Katrina WEAKENED at the last minute, its western eyewall virtually collapsed, and it turned AWAY from New Orleans, moving 40 miles east of the city instead of moving directly overhead! It was substantially smaller, weaker and less bad than expected!!!

This is completely and utterly outrageous. If the director of FEMA really thought on Saturday and Sunday that Katrina would, if it followed the predicted path, be a "typical hurricane situation," and that "the water would drain away fairly quickly," then he should be fired on the spot for being ignorant and incompetent to the point that he has no business working as a low-level functionary at FEMA, let alone as its director. And if he didn't really think that, but is just saying it in order to spin the political fallout from the hurricane, then he should be fired on the spot for being a dirty, filthy, stinking liar.

Either way, Michael Brown must go. This man has no business running FEMA, especially not at a time like this. My God.

Unbelievable.

P.S. I also cannot believe that Dan Turner, the Gannett "reporter" who wrote the article that includes Brown's quote, let Brown get away with his outrageous statements -- which are, again, either outright lies or clear evidence of criminal incompetence. And it gets worse! Not only did Turner fail to rebut Brown's words with any of the abundant and irrefutable facts that show how wrong he was, he actually backed Brown up by quoting a Florida official who makes his claimed ignorance sound reasonable:

Brig. Gen. Richard Flemming of the Florida National Guard backed Brown's characterization of the unusual circumstances affecting FEMA's response to Katrina.

Flemming, a veteran of six hurricane clean-up efforts in the past 16 months, said none of the four hurricanes that hit Florida last year were nearly as destructive as Katrina.
Well, gee, ya think?!? It's not like everyone who was remotely paying attention knew for years that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans would be much more destructive than any prior hurricane in all of American history! And it's not like the official National Hurricane Center forecasts from 11:00 PM Friday onward consistently called for exactly the track that would cause just that sort of destruction! Oh wait... yes, yes that's exactly what it's like!! Except FEMA was apparently out of the loop!

How dare the media let FEMA get away with this charade? Journalists of America, is it not your job to expose the powerful when they are either lying to the public or failing the public because of their incompetence? Brown's statement leaves no plausible room for doubt that one of those two things has occurred here. So expose it!!! Don't settle for the shameful, week-kneed journalistic sycophantism of Gannett's Dan Turner! Expose Michael Brown for the fraud he is!

UPDATE: The Washington Post has more on the broader failures here, of which Brown's ridiculous statements are only a symptom:

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!

The article goes on:
[T]he warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new [Homeland Security] bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.
The article proceeds with a damning indictment of how FEMA's absorption into the Homeland Security Department resulted in the de-prioritization of hurricane preparation in favor of more and more focus on terrorism. Although there are certainly political axes-to-grind at work here, it is also clear that something is very, very wrong. And as far as I'm concerned, it starts with Michael Brown. Just go back and read that again: "Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane situation ... that the water would drain away fairly quickly. ... Katrina was much larger than we expected." Wow. Wow. I have never been more angry at my government -- ever.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michelle Malkin finds another quote where Brown said that "as late as last Sunday he expected Katrina to be a 'standard hurricane' even though the National Weather Service in New Orleans was already predicting 'human suffering incredible by modern standards.'"

Brown's incompetence is incredible by modern standards. And yet Bush thinks he's doing "a heck of job." Jesus Christ.