From an NYTimes
article:
Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss
[...]
"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official[...] "I can't get a unified command established."
Yes, a horrible, horrible time. What ol' Brownie needed was a friend. And while LA Governor Blanco's husband Raymond (whom everyone loves) let Mike bend his ear for a while (I'm not making this up), what Brownie really needed was a big, strong man to come take control of the situation.
While [General Honoré] did not have responsibility for the entire relief effort and the Guard, his commanding manner helped mobilize the state's efforts.
"Honoré shows up and [...] boom, it starts happening. With Honoré, I have got exactly what I need."
So... in other words, a dude who's not in command finally got the ball rolling by filling in the gaps in your personality?
Peek below the fold for a Panopticon of Incompetent and Self-contradictory Buck-passery!
Brownie likes to have things both ways. I've done a bit of reorganizing of Brown's quotes in the article to bring this into sharp relief.
[Brown] focused much of his criticism on Governor Blanco, contrasting what he described as her confused response with far more agile mobilizations in Mississippi and Alabama, as well as in Florida during last year's hurricanes.
"What do you need? Help me help you," Mr. Brown said he asked them. "[...]and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing."
Governor Blanco's communications director, Mr. Mann, said that she was frustrated that Mr. Brown and others at FEMA wanted itemized requests before acting. "It was like walking into an emergency room bleeding profusely and being expected to instruct the doctors how to treat you," he said.
Fortunately, by Tuesday, he had been handed his precious list...
Mr. Brown passed the list on to the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, but when he returned that evening he was surprised to find that nothing had been done.
"I am just screaming at my F.C.O., 'Where are the helicopters?' " he recalled. " 'Where is the National Guard? Where is all the stuff that the mayor wanted?' "
FEMA, he said, had no helicopters and only a few communications trucks. The agency typically depends on state resources, a system he said worked well in the other Gulf Coast states and in Florida last year.
Whaaa? First, you couldn't help the state because they wouldn't give you a detailed list of what they needed... But then, given such a list, you find yourself shocked and dismayed to learn that the items on there weren't available?
Mr. Brown acknowledged that he had been criticized for not ordering a complete evacuation or calling in federal troops sooner. But he said the storm made it hard to communicate and assess the situation.
"Until you have been there," he said, "you don't realize it is the middle of a hurricane."
Amen. Coming from you, Brownie, that I believe.
I'll leave you with one last, choice piece of lethal self-contradiction:
On Monday night, Mr. Brown said, he reported his growing worries to Mr. Chertoff and the White House. He said he did not ask for federal active-duty troops to be deployed because he assumed his superiors in Washington were doing all they could. Instead, he said, he repeated a dozen times, "I cannot get a unified command established."
In other words "I would have asked for a detailed list of what was needed, but I assumed someone else would do it. Plus, I was too busy carping about my own ongoing failure to do my job."