posted by Miriam V.

September 10, 2005

Neigh to Cronies
By
MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the
payroll.

I just wish they'd stop putting them on the Homeland Security payroll.

Can't they stick their pals who failed at business in the Small Business
Administration and their tomatoes over at the Oilseeds and Rice Bureau of
the Ag
Department?

At least Bill Clinton knew not to stash his sweeties in jobs concerned with
keeping the nation safe. Gennifer Flowers said that Mr. Clinton got her a
$17,500
job in Arkansas in the state unemployment agency, though she was ranked
ninth out of 11 applicants tested. And Monica Lewinsky's thong expertise led
her
to a job as an assistant to the Pentagon press officer.

Gov. James McGreevey of New Jersey had to resign last year after
acknowledging that he had elevated his patronage peccadillo, an Israeli poet
named Golan
Cipel, to be his special assistant on homeland security without even a
background check or American citizenship. Mr. Cipel, however, was vastly
qualified
for his job compared with Michael Brown, who didn't know the difference
between a tropical depression and an anxiety attack when President Bush
charged
him with life-and-death decisions.

W. trusted Brownie simply because he was a friend of a friend. He was a
college buddy of Joe Allbaugh, who worked as W.'s chief of staff when he was
Texas
governor and as his 2000 presidential campaign manager.

It sounds more like a Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson flick than the story of a man
who was to be responsible for the fate of the Republic during the biggest
natural
disaster in our history. Brownie was a failed former lawyer with a degree
from a semiaccredited law school, as The New Republic put it, when he moved
to
Colorado in 1991 to judge horse judges for the Arabian Horse Association.

He was put out to pasture under pressure in 2001, leaving him free to join
his pal Mr. Allbaugh at an eviscerated FEMA. Mr. Allbaugh decided to leave
the
top job at FEMA and become a lobbyist with clients like Halliburton when the
agency was reorganized under Homeland Security, stripping it of authority.
Why not, Mr. Allbaugh thought, just pass this obscure sinecure to his
homeboy?

Time magazine reported that Brownie's official bio described his only stint
in emergency management as "assistant city manager" in Edmond, Okla. But a
city
official told Time that the FEMA chief had been "an assistant to the city
manager," which was "more like an intern."

Ever since W. was his father's loyalty enforcer, his political decisions
have been shaped more by loyalty than substance or competence. Mr. Bush
never did
warm up to his first secretary of state because Colin Powell rebuffed
appeals to help out in the Tallahassee recount of 2000.

The breakdown in management and communications was so execrable that the
president learned about the 25,000 desperate, trapped people at the New
Orleans
convention center not from Brownie, who didn't know himself, but from a wire
story carried into the Oval Office by an aide on Thursday, 24 hours after
the victims had been pleading and crying for help on every channel. (Maybe
tomorrow the aide will come in with a wire story, "No W.M.D. in Iraq.")

"Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult," a White
House aide told The Times's Elisabeth Bumiller. Not if you had a TV.

As Mexican troops arrived in Texas to help with Katrina refugees, Brownie
was recalled to Washington, where he said he wanted to get "a good Mexican
meal
and a stiff margarita." Yeah, it was hard to get any good étouffée in New
Orleans given the E. coli. The president should find that little bullhorn
from
ground zero, put it right on Brownie's ear and yell at him to get the heck
out of there.

FEMA was a disaster waiting to happen, the minute a disaster struck. As
The Washington Post reported Friday,
five of the eight top FEMA officials were simply Bush loyalists and
political operatives who "came to their posts with virtually no experience
in handling
disasters."

While many see the hideous rescue failures as disaster apartheid, Barbara
Bush and other Republicans have tried to look on the bright side for the
victims.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Representative Richard Baker of Baton
Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing
in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

Even those who believe in intelligent design must surely agree that Brownie
and Representative Baker weren't part of it.