Horrible clarity
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 
Hurricane Katrina made landfall August 29. That was a month ago, which means we are scheduled to forget all about it any minute now. A massive effort is underway to rebuild George Bush after all so much unfiltered bad news. But I’m not at all sure that raising the terror alert level again will do the trick.
Getting rid of Michael Brown only seems to have helped a little. Brown is not only an incompetent, he’s an incompetent with a padded resume who helped Bush win Florida by paying $31 million in bogus hurricane claims.
Homeland Security sources told the Post that after the hurricanes that Brown “and his allies [recommended] him to succeed Tom Ridge as Homeland Security secretary because of their claim that he helped deliver Florida to President Bush by efficiently responding to the Florida hurricanes.”The South Florida Sun-Sentinel uncovered emails from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that confirmed those allegations and directly implicated Brown as playing politics at the expense of hurricane victims.
“As the second hurricane in less than a month bore down on Florida last fall, a federal [FEMA] consultant predicted a “huge mess” that could reflect poorly on President Bush and suggested that his re-election staff be brought in to minimize any political liability, records show,” the Sentinel reported in a March 23 story.
“Two weeks later, a Florida official summarizing the hurricane response wrote that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was handing out housing assistance “to everyone who needs it without asking for much information of any kind.”
The records the Sentinel obtained were contained in hundreds of pages of Gov. Jeb Bush’s storm-related e-mails the paper received from the governor’s office under the threat of a lawsuit.
