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Edited on Fri Aug-04-06 09:40 PM by Rosco T.
Browine rips BushCo up side and down the other, names names and assigns blame, including some to himself.
He may have been incompetent, but it's obvious he was set up from the get go.
"We are less prepared now than before Katrina. The mistake was the knee-jerk reaction after 9/11. Politicians always want to show they're doing something: 'We're going to rearrange everything. We're going to redo the organizational chart,' All buzzwords. 'We're going to create these synergies.' As a result it's more of a mess than ever."
If Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff should take charge during the next crisis? "I don't think it would be a good thing. Chertoff is a bright man, but he's an appellate judge. He tends to manage the way you do court decisions: 'Put the brief in front of me and I'll make a decision.' You need more of a strategic point of view. You need dynamism, leadership and a plan."
His reaction to Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor's statement on Brown's inability to relate to the devastation and loss people experienced from the hurricane? "That congressman, that little twerp, said I didn't understand suffering. He said I didn't understand the death and suffering that was going on. As I told him, I've seen death and suffering. I've smelled death. I smelled death in the tsunami. I know what it's like to lose close friends in disasters. You don't know how many people I've hugged as FEMA director-rich people, poor people, all ethnicities, people who lost everything. People who didn't think it was going to happen to them. For that little twerp to claim I didn't understand death and suffering-he can just bite me, for all I care."
On Bush's statement "No one anticipated the breach of the levees- " "He doesn't have an incredible command of the English language. Maybe he meant 'None of us really wanted this to happen.' My friends in the Republican Party-the bullies-jumped all over Clinton about parsing words. Now the president was parsing words. 'Are the levees going to break?' 'Are they going to top?' Who cares? We are going to have flooding in New Orleans, and we knew New Orleans was a fishbowl."
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