Brown: Politics played role in Katrina

From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:

Brown, speaking at the Metropolitan College of New York, said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the devastating hurricane be federalized — a term Brown explained as placing the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster.

"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'" he said, without naming names. "'We can't do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'"

Brown, 52, declined to say who in the White House had argued for federalizing the response only in Louisiana. He said that he'd later learned of the machinations through Blanco's office and from federal officials.

Blanco reacted sharply to Brown's remarks.

"This is exactly what we were living but could not bring ourselves to believe. Karl Rove was playing politics while our people were dying," Blanco said through a spokeswoman, referring to Bush's top political strategist. "The federal effort was delayed, and now the public knows why. It's disgusting."

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Amazingly, I'm still loving this. The White House hung Brown out to dry, totally scapegoating him. I mean, okay, Brownie did not do "a heckuva job," but in retrospect the guy was set up, a political appointee in a job for which he wasn't qualified; ultimately, that's Bush's fault much more than Brown's. When they tried to make him take the fall for the federal government's jaw-dropping failure in New Orleans, he broke ranks and squealed, like any normal human being would do, which probably says a lot about guys like former CIA chief Tenet and others who kept their mouths shut while the Oval Office stuck it up their ass. At any rate, this latest info from Brown is very interesting, to say the least: we now know that the White House wasn't paralyzed by indecision or anything along those lines while the Big Easy descended into Hell; they were hard at work trying to figure out how they could fuck their political enemies. It's pretty clear that the Bush White House has never been serious about the role of the Presidency. Instead, they've used the office exclusively for their own purposes, not giving a single shit whether the nation lives or dies.

These are some truly evil people.

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