Starving the government into submersion

Well Brownie took the fall but Reuters reports on a memo indicating it was Chertoff that delayed the federal response to Katrina - most possibly to give Bush time to get back to the White House after a final overnight vacation rest stop in Crawford. Unsurprisingly, at least to those who follow the follies of the war on some drugs, a key factor in the delay was a task force.

"As you know, the President has established the `White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.' He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina," Chertoff said in the memo to the secretaries of defense, health and human services and other key federal agencies.

This clearly contributed to the 36 hour delay that created the hell on earth the surviviors endured. However, a spokesman for DHS disputes this clear cause and effect.

"There was a tremendous sense of urgency," Knocke said. "We were mobilizing the greatest response to a disaster in the nation's history."

If this is an example of how they act with urgency, God help us when an unexpected emergency occurs.

A former FEMA director under President Reagan expressed shock by the inaction that Chertoff's memo suggested. It showed that Chertoff "does not have a full appreciation for what the country is faced with - nor does anyone who waits that long," said Gen. Julius Becton Jr., who was FEMA director from 1985-1989.

Meanwhile for the critics who accuse accountability bloggers of mere Bus-bashing, there's this.

The Chertoff memo indicates that the response to Katrina wasn't left to disaster professionals, but was run out of the White House, said George Haddow, a former deputy chief of staff at FEMA during the Clinton administration and the co-author of an emergency management textbook.

"It shows that the president is running the disaster, the White House is running it as opposed to Brown or Chertoff," Haddow said. Brown "is a convenient fall guy. He's not the problem really. The problem is a system that was marginalized."

I would add deliberately marginalized by an administration more concerned with corporate plunder and cronyism than public safety. They didn't quite fulfill Grover Norquist's dream of shrinking the government small enough to drown in a bathtub, but it was emasciated enough to have succumbed to a city-sized lake.