Among Brownie's
outrageous and
untruthful statements yesterday, the one that caught my attention was
this:
BROWN: Congressman, FEMA is not there to supply gasoline, transportation. It is not the role of the federal government to supply five gallons of gas for every individual to put in a car to go somewhere. That is not the role of the federal government. I personally believe that that is a horrible path to go down.
And while my heart goes out to people on fixed incomes, it is primarily a state and local responsibility. And in my opinion, it's the responsibility of faith-based organizations, of churches and charities and others to help those people.
More in extended.
Brownie later tried again to spread blame to the churches:
DAVIS: Now, on August 31st you said that FEMA is going to ask the Gulf population for the time being to turn to the American Red Cross, the charities, the Salvation Army, local churches and others who can provide for your immediate needs.
Did you say this because local, state and federal government assets were not prepared to handle the catastrophe of Katrina?
BROWN: No. We always suggest that. We always ask people to turn immediately to their churches, the faith-based organizations, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, because they can do certain things that we cannot do.
DAVIS: They don't have the red tape problems either, do they?
They don't have the red tape issues you do.
BROWN: Well, sometimes they do, but not always.
Brownie was grasping at straws here--the notion that churches should get into the gas distribution business is absurd--but the idea of faith-based emergency response didn't come out of nowhere. In a prescient November 2004 article entitled
What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?, Shirley Laska of the University of New Orleans wrote:
Unwilling to merely accept this reality, emergency managers and representatives of nongovernmental disaster organizations, local universities, and faith based organizations have formed a working group to engage additional faith-based organizations in developing ride-sharing programs between congregation members with cars and those without. In the wake of Ivan's near miss, this faith-based initiative has become a catalyst in the movement to make evacuation assistance for marginalized groups (those without means of evacuation) a top priority for all levels of government.
I don't view this reliance on faith-based organizations as a move toward of theocracy; neither do I take Bush's recent calls for the military to coordinate emergency response as a move to establish a military-run dictatorship. The Republican leadership does not really want either theocracy or a police state. Rather, in their desperate attempts to cover their asses, Bush and Brown are seeking refuge in two institutions that conservatives love--the Church and the military--and by "love" I mean, "love to exploit for short term political gain." The obvious solution to the problem of emergency response would be to have a Federal Agency charged with Managing Emergencies, staffed by trained, competent, and dedicated professionals. Unfortunately, effective government conflicts with BushCo's belief that bureaucracy is inherently bloated and corrupt. By staffing federal agencies with political hacks, Bush et al. have been making this belief come true.