Fire Brown. Fire Chertoff.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has reverted to its former self. In 1992, when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, FEMA fumbled...badly. Friends of mine at work were taking time off to drive down to Homestead to find their families. They were buying water, ice, and food to bring, because the slow-footed clods at FEMA were sitting in Washington DC pushing memos back and forth. Bush the elder fiddled while South Florida burned. FEMA was nearly disbanded.

Whether you love or hate Bill Clinton, I applaud him for bringing James Lee Witt on board to fix FEMA's problems. FEMA was granted Cabinet-level status, and Witt streamlined the agency. FEMA became a well-regulated, effective agency. Then came September 11th. Since reorganization creates the illusion of progress, the Department of Homeland Security was formed. Agencies without sufficient political clout were dumped in DHS, where the focus was on terrorism. FEMA, whose raison de'tere was natural disasters, was lost in the shuffle.

It got worse when Michael Brown, the current head of FEMA, was tapped to run the organization. Before coming to FEMA, Brown headed the International Arabian Horse Association. Wondering about the connection between horses and disaster management? Me too.

You've seen Brown on TV - Bush calls him "Brownie" (a childish nickname, but better than his nickname for Karl Rove: "Turd Blossom"). Brown is utterly flummoxed by Katrina. He seems clueless, content to get his information on the disaster and its aftermath from CNN. So clueless is Brown, Ted Koppel asked him "Don't you guys watch television? Don't you guys listen to the radio?" Evidently not. Michael Brown is nothing but a political hack, put into office courtesy of cronyism. Michael Brown needs to be fired.

His boss at the Department if Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, is another political hack. Chertoff bellows that Katrina "exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight." Don't you read the papers, Mike? Back in 2002, the Times-Picayune has a series called "Washing Away" that was horribly prophetic. It covered in detail what a major hurricane would do. Did the DHS or FEMA read it? Apparently not. They sat on their hands while Katrina (then a Category 4/5) rumbled toward the Gulf Coast. They sat on their hands when the first feeder bands slammed into Mississippi and Louisiana. They sat on their hands as people drowned, as criminals took over the city of New Orleans, and as conditions deteriorated. If the immediate damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina were instead caused by terrorism, would DHS have handled it any better? I think not. If Katrina was the first test of the DHS with regards to handling a major catastrophe, it failed miserably. Michael Chertoff needs to be fired.