This should be on front pages -- maybe Joe Lieberman would notice it then:
Brown said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the hurricane be federalized, making the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster.
"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it," he said.
The problem, of course, is that it's Michael Brown saying it.
2 comments:
Borwn's reccommendations, whether true or not, bespeak poorly of the real problem with federal response to disasters. All in all, it is the state and local governments who must respond and the federals who supply money and logistics.
I've been through this argument any number of times with those who wanted to blame Blanco and those who wanted to blame Bush.
Basically, when something like this gets "federalized," the state no longer has any real authority to do anything, so in real terms the "it's the state's responsibility to respond" mantra is just so much bullshit, no matter the legalities.
Sure, everyone could have been done better on all sides, but that slides past the real issue that Brown raised, which is the politicization of everything, including the response to natural disasters, under this administration. One need only remember the speed and precision of the federal reaction in Florida the year before to see that something was rotten here.
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