What can Brown do for you?

From the if I only had a brain department:
(WSJ, 9/28/2005, A3 column 4)

Aaaahhh.... the great Mike Brown was grilled in congress the other day for FEMA's response to Katrina, and of course he shifted all the blame to local officials. He did have the balls to say this:

"I predicted privately for several years that we were going to reach this point [of crisis] because of lack of resources and the lack of attention being paid to what was [once] ... a very robust organization"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the HEAD of FEMA was in charge of securing resources, screaming at people, and building a strong organization. What I'm curious about is, what in sam's hell has he been doing since 2001? It feels like he is stepping aside and critiquing his own work... um... non-work. Oh I see, he's trying to confuse me.

A week before Katrina, he did have half a mind to tell Andy Card that "this is going to be a bad one". Now, I'm sure that he did indeed do a fine job in overseeing over 150 presidentialy declared disasters. You would have thought that he would have learned something about it. Especially because is was "going to be a bad one". Seriously, if it was going to be as "bad" as he predicted, he couldn't have expected the local officials to be a least bit organized, right? If this was going to be a "bad" one, wouldn't' he have asked about the evacuation plans? Even when he doesn't talk to his own people, wouldn't he have watched any of the news networks? How can he tell people that he didn't' know about the Superdome for days? Do they even have a TV set at FEMA.

I don't think any of his responses will ever be enough. That's pretty scary. I think we have a better chance of surviving disasters with a whiny little girl in charge.... at least she'd flag down some attention to the shortfalls of the agency.