Who to blame, who to blame

Blanche,

I have seen this kind of thing talked about in various news outlets, web sites and on msnbc and cnn. Nobody is faulting the federal response before the event. The problems is what happened from Tuesday until now and into the future.

Local and state wide failures were also horrendous. if your going to start assigning blame, mayor and the Governor are for sure on the list.

But, the failure of the federal government was huge and I think the reasons for that failure were the following:

1) Lowering the status of FEMA from a Cabinet Position to a sub organization within HomeLand Security. In a time of Crisis, this extra level of bureaucracy got people killed.

2) In the last 4 years FEMA has been given a lot more to do (Terrorist response) while having its budget cut. One former employee of FEMA claims that this lack of focus on FEMA's traditional role got a lot of people killed. Many current and former FEMA employees are speaking out and expressing same in whats happened to their organization.

3) The last two directors of FEMA have been hand picked political appointees who have almost no experience at disaster relief and have made some terrible decisions that got a lot of people killed. Both were appointed to this "Plum" posting because of the work they did for the election campaigns.

4) Michael Brown, Current director of FEMA has no executive management experiance, has no experiance with any form of disaster or emergency response. His previous job was with the International Arabian Horse Association as a lawyer. According to people at the association, he was fired for gross incompetence and the association had to change its name because it was bankrupted.

5) President Bush didnt get engaged and didnt take this seriously quickly enough. That got a lot of people killed. He has created an environment around himself where no one tells him bad news so he didnt really find out there was a problem until late wednesday. And they he did not take charge of the situation and kick butts to fix the problem until Friday and some are saying that was pretty weak. He congratulated his cronies for doing a good job when things were completely out of control.

Blanche, please stop watching fox news. They are trying to spin this whole thing as a failure at the local level. It was that, but its shameful how the Bush administration is ultimately to blame for the failure at the federal level.

We live in a wonderful time where incompetent politicians can no longer control information. Google around a bit and find people who are reporting the truth. Dont trust the left wing blogs or the right wing either... but get the real story... its out there and available via the net.