Editor and Publisher
by Greg Mitchell

09/03/05

While a rising chorus in the press has taken the White House, FEMA and the Pentagon to task for performing miserably in their response to the human disaster on the Gulf Coast, few have focused on the most telling aspect of the entire failure. It’s not just incompetence. It’s a shameful lack of concern: The 9/11 “My Pet Goat” dithering on an administration-wide scale. Simply stated, the president and his top advisers chose vacation over action. While the media has done a good job in portraying the overall deadly failure of leadership, it has not focused enough on this deadly dereliction of duty..... And what of FEMA chief Michael Brown? He was so out-of-it that he didn’t even know about 10,000 evacuees living and dying at the Convention Center, even after they had received wide TV coverage for hours and hours. The next day, the president greeted him with, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job'...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054581


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp