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September 12, 2005
Accountability: the American way
Okay, so I'm obsessing on Katrina, just like a lot of other people. So shoot me.
You may find this amazingly dense of me but it wasn't until yesterday, when I was reading an article by Scott Dougherty, lead center director of the North Carolina SBDC, that I realized why everybody is so shocked by what happened in the wake of that storm.
Dougherty wrote about the rapid and efficient response by FEMA to the damage done by Hurricane Floyd in his state in 1999, and it suddenly hit me. Above and beyond the shocking state to which the stranded hurricane victims had been reduced, there was also the shock of unmet expectations.
We Americans are used to a FEMA that gets there expeditiously when tragedy strikes. We may not expect the kind of heroics performed by the actor who played the FEMA director in the movie Asteroid (can't remember his name), but we do expect that FEMA will move when required.
We so expect it that we had come to take it almost entirely for granted.
So, when it didn't happen like that, it's too much to expect that either the people or the media will simply let it go away.
The seeds of the eventual disintegration of FEMA were sown early during the Bush Administration. Terry Neal, in today's Talking Points column reminds us that Bush's original appointment as FEMA director, Joseph Allbaugh, referred to the agency in a Senate subcommittee hearing as "an oversized entitlement program" and warned that "expectations of when the federal government should be involved, and the degree of involvement, may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."
I sincerely hope that Neal is right, that the public won't forget. Bush does not seem to be willing to hold his cronies accountable, which makes it all the more important for the rest of us to do so.
But there's something else niggling at the back of my brain.
Somehow it belatedly strikes me as an ominous portent when the President's appointee expresses that kind of contempt for the agency he is nominated to run.
So, it should come as no real surprise that the same agency has been decimated to the point that it is wholly ineffectual in a real emergency under this Administration.
If we'd all been paying attention, we wouldn't be shocked at all.
Posted by The Journal Blogger at September 12, 2005 05:12 PM
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