I posted this earlier today on
my blog Attytood but wanted to make sure that it got out there. It seems that Michael Brown and his No. 2 and No. 3 guys aren't the only Bush political hacks over at FEMA. The new administration
also gave high-level jobs to two Florida lawyers who helped (like John Bolton and John Roberts, among others) on the 2000 Florida recount.
Oh, and that's not all. The guy running FEMA's recovery team -- i.e., the people in charge of recovery from a disaster like Katrina -- is a former GOP political consultant who doled out federal money in 2004 to people in the Miami area even though the hurricane missed Dade County and moved north.
And the FEMA guy who ran Hurricane Pam, the mock disaster drill in 2004 that should have told officials how catastrophic a Cat 4 hurricane would be in New Orleans? Yep, a top official in the 2000 Bush campaign. All at an agency largely depoliticized under Clinton.
Neither of the Florida recount aides, Jacksonville attorney Reynold Hoover and Miami lawyer Mark Wallace, had any experience in emergency management before they were named by the Bush administration to FEMA, now under fire for its botched response to Hurricane Katrina.
Hoover, a longtime "explosives expert" with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who became a lawyer in 1996, is still with FEMA as its director of national security coordination. Wallace left the Bush administration in 2004 to become deputy manager of the president's re-election campaign, and is now a lobbyist.
It's time to replace the whole political crew over there, and let some career FEMA types -- i.e., the adults -- run things over there, although it's a little late for the folks in Louisiana and Mississippi