Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. has an interesting article online everyone
should check out. It is a rather large article, but I want to highlight the
opening statement of it.

Two Bush 2000 Florida recount aides
were rewarded with top FEMA posts

 Reversing an eight-year crusade to rid the now-embattled Federal
Emegency Management Agency of political patronage, a newly elected George W.
Bush in 2001 named two key players in his Florida recount fight to important
FEMA posts.

Neither man, Jacksonville attorney Reynold Hoover (pictured at left) and
Miami lawyer Mark Wallace, had any experience in emergency management before
they were named by the Bush administration to FEMA, now under fire for its
botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

Hoover, a longtime “explosives expert” with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms who became a lawyer in 1996, is still with FEMA as its
director of national security coordination. Wallace left the Bush
administration in 2004 to become deputy manager of the president’s
re-election campaign, and is now a lobbyist.

They are two more names to add to the list of political appointees and
out-and-out hacks at FEMA. Many are calling for the firing of agency chief
Michael Brown, the ousted head of a horse association who was hired at FEMA
in 2001 along with his college roommate, top Bush advisor Joe Allbaugh. And
it was reported yesterday that FEMA’s No. 2 and No. 3 officials, Patrick
Rhode and Scott Morris, are also former campaign aides.

Consider this quote:

“FEMA is widely viewed as a ‘dumping ground,’ a turkey farm, if you
will, where large numbers of positions exist that can be conveniently and
quietly filled by political appointment,” the preliminary report said. “This
has led to a situation where top officials, having little or no experience
in disaster or emergency management, are creating substantial morale
problems among careerists and professionals. ”

Appropriate in the wake of the agency’s bungled efforts over the last 10
days in Louisiana and Mississippi? Yes — but the above quote is from 1992,
during the administration of George H.W. Bush. It came from a preliminary
report from the staff of the House Appropriations Committee, and it was
written before FEMA came under fire that year for a tardy response to
Florida’s Hurricane Andrew. (Note: Any article not linked came from the
Nexis search engine.)

The Andrew debacle was one of many factors in the first President Bush’s
failed re-election bid. They say that good government is good politics, and
so when Bill Clinton arrived at the White House in 1993, he made a serious
effort to rid FEMA of political hackery.

Clinton hired a professional, James Lee Witt, to run the agency and that
May Witt told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, according to a
Washington Post article, “that FEMA ‘will not be doing business as usual’
and that he was committed to making his organization ‘one of the most
respected agencies in this nation.’

The article is a rather lengthy read in its entirety, but the opening of it
shows once again how Bush has used his cronies to reshape the protection our
government provides its people. It also proves that Republican leadership does
not put the necessary emphasis on disasters or protection that the Democratic
leadership has.

Please take the time to read the article in its entirety
here.