Psst! You know what's scarier than Republicans governing? "Bipartisan" agreement among incompetents, just when it's time to protect the country from predictable disasters. Real emergency and rescue experts like
Leo Bosner and
John Copenhaver know exactly how to fix FEMA. For starters, they all agree it should be separate from Homeland Security - whose mission is to change the threat color, detain travelers at airports, threaten immigrants, and lock up innocent Muslims - a totally different and unrelated job!
But our politicians are so power hungry, and so busy covering up recent mistakes, they want do exactly the opposite - eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and create a a replacement within Homeland Security. And if we let them, it will cost many more lives this summer and beyond.
It's time to yank off our partisan blinders, just to save each other's lives.
Like every Kossack, on a good day I'm down with pretending the Democrats are good enough - that replacing Republicans with them should be our primary goal till November. I want to believe it. But when peoples' lives are in danger, we have to stop pretending when incumbents aren't good enough.
Don't forget - Michael Chertoff, the lead incompetent behind Katrina failures, was a bipartisan choice like Homeland Security itself - and still is. And not one Democrat objected to Arabian horse show expert Michael Brown running FEMA. The experienced people know it's obvious how to make FEMA work: simply remove it from Homeland Security, fully fund it again, and hire back the staff of emergency experts. Instead, a bipartisan panel of the same Senate morons, led by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, says to scrap FEMA itself and create a new agency within Homeland Security! - just in time for hurricane season.
Disbanding what's left of FEMA and further scattering its expertise is far more obviously stupid than, say, disbanding the Iraqi Army was. Our representatives need to snap out of it fast, or we need to stop them and replace them all. For starters, Ned Lamont should make Lieberman's incompetence on DHS and FEMA lead issues this summer.
To his credit, Senator Lautenberg has his ears and eyes open, contradicting the panel's recommendation:
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said FEMA needs to be stripped out of the larger department and restored to an independent Cabinet-level agency. "That's how it was done in the past and it worked as we hoped," said Lautenberg, a member of the Senate panel.
Here we are going into what could easily be the warmest summer in modern history - with New Orleans barely repaired and coastline levees in states like California already broken - and we're watching the two most corrupt and culpable parties agree to scrap our emergency protection, so they can expand their power instead of correcting their mistakes! And how could they ever admit the systemic truth? - "Terror experts like Richard Clarke and emergency experts agree - the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy threatens your safety, and panels like ours shouldn't even exist!"
The only possible up side: when the nation is predictably unprepared for this summer's extreme weather - with our National Guard still in Iraq, our big helicopters and amphibious vehicles still being blown up in the Middle East desert, and Homeland Security still pretending it knows how to handle emergencies - the loss of life will be the most glorious ad ever for writing in smart new candidates with no damning track records, voting Green, and running for office ourselves this fall.
(Those of us on the periphery of politics typically stay out of it because we imagine that on core "keep the trains running on time" issues, experienced politicians might know better, while we might make a dangerous mistake. It's time to put those fears behind us and get directly involved. The stakes keep getting higher and the mistakes are all in charge. Not running for office is starting to look like watching a moron disable the safety on a loaded weapon before teasing your family with it.)