"I take responsibility"

[Occhidiangela]

Your implication would appear to be that FEMA could not have done its job any better, given the circumstances.

You talkin to me? (Deniro Voice) ;)

I am sure some more perfect out come could have been wished for, and coordination could have been better, in the Compound Emergency. LIkewise, every power sweep in a football game should go for a touchdown, but IRL or in a football game, you work in a resistant medium.

The loss of the structure of valid state and local response, and the utter devastation of infrastructure and transport, as well as the ease with which the lawless erupted, hamstrung FEMA's efforts, and every other contributing agency. FEMA's success relies heavily on success of supporting agencies, please accept my experiences in the FEMA / Military interface in disaster planning, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, as valid.

: why would the Bush camp erect as a scapegoat someone who a.) is clearly not the most qualified candidate for the job and b.) was directly appointed by Bush. 

That is how the game is played. And how do you ascertain who "the most qualified candidate is" for any cabinet post? Gimme a break. I have watched a parade of buffoons, over the past 30 years, fill a variety of cabinet posts:

Cyrus Vance (State)
James Watt (Interior)
William Cohen (Defense)

That's just for starters.

What possible political strategy would lead the White House to make this move?

If no one gets fired, no one was held accountable. Someone got fired, someone was held accountable. How hard is that to understand?

There are hurricanes in Florida every year: the resources and contingency plans for dealing with such disasters are already established and in place. 

New Orleans called for some innovation, some footwork, and the response was a complete and utter failure on the part of FEMA. 

Now you are talking out of your Ivory Tower, and you have again chosen to ignore the frightening incompetence of the State and Local authorities.

Requires Innovation? Nice platitude. Hard to innovate on the piano when half the keys are gone, dear friend.

Your comparison of the two, and your judgement that Brown's appointment is somehow justifiable on the basis of his handling of the Florida hurricanes requires some defense -

Did you read the FEMA biographical clip of his background? It was as good as, and in some cases better, than any number of political appointees I have seen over the years. Political appointees are POLITICAL appointees. That is how the game is played. I return once again the the complete ass, John Deutsch, as CIA director. Talk about a collossal f*** up.

The fact that he handled the Florida cases is not definitive proof of the appropriateness of his appointment. 

Now you are making me giggle. You seek perfection in political appointment? OK, please pass me the doobie when you are done drawing on it. :D

It met the good enough standard. If he were so bad, so egregiously AFU, he'd have made a hash of those as well. Hurricane George was a Significant Emotional Event. That was no minor hurricane.

Given that Brown's successor is a FAR more qualified candidate who could quite easily have been given the job in the first place, I really am curious: what is it that would drive the Bush camp to replace Brown if not the absolute need to do so? 

Thank you, 20/20) hindsight. See above. Why do you assume this country is teeming with qualified (may have) and politically reliable for the administration in power (harder standard for many to meet) for every position in government? And, who are interested in serving the public?

The act of replacing him, whether or not it is due to media pressure is as much as an admission of guilt on Bush's part.

Guilt of what? Picking a guy whose Peter Principle threshold had not yet been reached? Again, this happens rather frequently in American politics. Les Aspin, Sec Def for a year, then fired.

It happens.

I firmly believe that the ONLY reason that Bush would replace Brown is due to the fact that he really is incapable of handling the situation, as an admission of guilt on that front is as much as to admit that he has neglected his duty as president of the United States, as per my post above.

Your if then is broken. It is not an admission of neglect of his duty, and if you read any of the articles not shrilly screaming about all kinds of red herrings, (funny, I thought herrings came from the North Sea, not the Gulf of Mexico) you would have known that the president was, within the law, trying to put the strong arm on the LA Governor to get her sorry butt in gear, so federal aid could be phased in. No, the admission of neglect are YOUR words, not those of the President. He will only admit what he admits. (My own views on his competence will rest for another time.)

This hurricane is no test of his quality. Were John Kerry President, and Albert Einstein the FEMA chief, the long term neglect, local failure, and systemic local political neglect of both planning and infrastructure would have all made

Pretty Much The Same Mess.

In other words, he had to be forced by Brown's incompetence into replacing him - from a public relations perspective, replacing Brown is the last thing that Bush would ever want to do, as it amounts to self-incrimination on a scale that is, to my mind, worthy of significant punishment.

Chaer, I think you don't understand American politics particularly well. What I heard him say, between the lines, was that he is responsible for solutions to remedy the mess and the structural problem. Of course, he speaks so poorly, he might have been trying to sort out a carry out Chinese order for all the merit his speech had. :P

You would need to hang GHW Bush, WJ Clinton, GW Bush, and every Mayor of NO, Gov of Louisiana, and each and every Senator and Rep from Louisiana since about 1990 if you want to hang the guilty for the infrastructure defects that led to levy failure. That is where the compound emergency arose from. The lack of evac is purely a local failure. LOCAL.

You also appear to confuse the structures and limits of fedaralism in America with somewhere else, notwithstanding that disaster response is a miniscule portion of the Chief Executive's concerns. Much of the first response is delegated to the states, by statue and by agreement, legally binding agreement.

As to response failures, see Ghostiger's on point reply regarding the criminal failure of the Governor of Louisiana to set the interagency, state-federal event chain in motion. The Governor of Florida, Lawton Chiles, did something similar for Andrew and got his arse handed to him. He took much heat. He was the guy, and I loved him for this, who filed a 2 billion dollar federal suit against Pres Clinton's government for failure to defend America's Borders and the cost to his state handling illegal aliens.

His successor, Jeb Bush, learned from the mistake of his predecessor. He got help early. However, the LA governor is too stupid to learn from someone else's mistake, so she has to make her own.

For her, a wall, a blindfold, and a cigarette. She failed her people monumentally. What I don't get was what she was trying to prove with her wait and see posture? That she was lucky at rolling the dice? They always come up 42.

Louisiana has a hurricane season every year. The Gulf Coast of Louisiana has hurricanes hit nearly every year. Louisiana is no stranger to hurricanes, flooding, and they always need to have an actionable plan.

As I pointed out earlier, this was a compound emergency. I don't think very many any of you "get" that, yet. It's a heart attack that has added to it during surgery an epileptic seizure and internal bleeding in the lower abdomen. Sometimes the patient dies.

The hurricanes in Fla were not compound, which made FEMA's job less burdensome, kept the problem below the Peter Principle threshold, so yes, the overall effort was less difficult to coordinate, as the

Transporation and communication infrastructure was not nearly as badly disrupted in those cases.

And the State of Florida DID NOT SIT ON ITS HANDS.

And that, my very sharp friend, is precisely the point. The backbone on which any plan is built will, once removed, shatter the plan.

I think those who point to how FEMA's job was made more difficult by being assimilated by the HSC borg has a decent point, and I tend to agree,

BUT

FEMA is, and always was, the pivot man in a circle jerk. With a check book.

The task of FEMA is to coordinate a host of interagency and interorganization activities, cross functional activities, and write contracts, fund rapid influx of materials and people, etc. No matter that they are "independent" or a major department of DHS (See the Air Force when it was the Army Air Corps, under the Army for a gross analogue) they still have a discrete and coherent mission.

That missions relies on cooperation and timely response by local and state elements. That was sorely lacking. It relise on timely

DECISION MAKING

That was absent.

It has to act lawfully, within its lawful bounds. That slowed Federal decision making.

Bush can't fire the criminally inept governor of Louisiana, nor can he stand in front of a wall, blindfolded with a cigarette, the mayor of New Orleans. Some say that is a shame, I say that is good. The State of Louisiana will address their own idiotic leaders, just as DC addressed Marion Barry. Some will excuse them because "Whitey Be Keeping Me Down!" The race card has been in play for weeks, I see anyone playing in that game and raise them two lire.

So, Bush scapegoats his FEMA chief. That comes with the badge, at that level: things go wrong on your watch, you may hang. My years as a naval officer taught me that the accountability piece has to be there for all commanders, of which the FEMA director was a sort. So, he gets relieved.

Is there fault in the Federal Government not acting illegally and taking over against the wishes of State authorities.

NO! NO! and a thousand times NO! This is America, and our federalism is supposed to be limited. There are MOU's and Letter's of Agreement between Federal Agencies and states that cover a whole host of coordination. Those letters are scraps of paper when the State lies inert.

See one of my first posts on this topic. America is not any other place. States guard their rights jealously, despite massive federal encroachment. States have to stand up and play smart as a consequence of that. The State of Texas is STILL in court over the base closures in 1993 and environmental clean up. Their opponent? Federal government.

That's our system, as it IS, not as some Federalist Patermalist Socialist pigs would wish it.

Occhi