It really is quite outragously arrogant and stupid how these political appointees who are quite happy to feed at the federal trough whine when people actually expect them to do something for their paychecks. Michael Hitzik writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The federal officials assigned to New Orleans have displayed an appalling combination of arrogance and ignorance. Thursday evening on NPR, I heard Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who oversees FEMA, dismiss reports of thousands of refugees trapped at the New Orleans convention center for days without sustenance. He called the reports, in so many words, "rumors and anecdotes."

Informed that an NPR reporter had been on the scene, he sniffed, "I can't argue with you about what your reporter tells you." Later, his staff called back to say that he had "received a report confirming the situation" and that he was now "working tirelessly" to get food to the location.

At a news conference that day, FEMA Director Michael Brown, Allbaugh's successor and college chum, attributed the death toll in New Orleans "to people who did not heed evacuation warnings." Insensitive to the truth that many of the stranded had no way of responding to the warnings — no money, no transport out of the city and nowhere to go — he blamed them for having failed to prepare any better than, well, the federal government.

But this isn't just about personalities, but the moral bankruptcy of conservatism that attempts to claim that America is stronger if we don't give a shit about each other, that all of our tax dollars should go to buddies of the politicians rather than to building and maintaining our country's infrastructure.

New Orleans is, or should be, the graveyard of the conservative ideology that government is useless. An American city is reduced to Third World desperation as people who own nothing scrounge for necessities in a sea of waste and federal officials offer lame excuses about how their disaster plans would have worked fine had there not been, you know, a disaster. The president, at the head of a global power that can't get its own troops or supplies off their bases to reach the needful, whines, "The private sector needs to do its part."

This deplorable performance has deep roots. Joe M. Allbaugh, a Bush campaign hack without any crisis management experience who was named director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, disparaged federal disaster assistance as "an oversized entitlement program" before Congress in 2001. The public's expectations of government in a disaster situation, he said, "may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." He advised stricken communities to rely for help on "faith-based organizations … like the Salvation Army and the Mennonite Disaster Service."

If Allbaugh were not an amateur, he would have known that communities, "faith-based organizations" and the private sector become overwhelmed by disasters more modest than this one. In a crisis the federal government should be the first responder, not the last, to take charge, not wait to be asked.

Cynicism on such a scale is self-perpetuating. Determined to portray government as little but an intrusion into people's lives, this gang made it irrelevant to hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina — thus giving them, and us, good reason to be cynical after all.

This, and all the hate rhetoric spewing from the right-wing should serve as a wake-up call to decent Americans who just want to see our government -- our country -- to do the right thing by people in desperate need. It's clear that our country's leaders are failing at it, and resentful of us for expecting them to do their jobs.

Cynical? Who has time for being cynical? I'm far too busy fighting tears of rage.

Further reading: FEMA Can't Do Anything Right

About author

media girl also blogs at other places.