FEMA: Oopsy Daisy

Johnny: So ... FEMA sure is stubborn.

Audience: How stubborn is it?

Johnny: It's so stubborn it won't stop to ask for directions when it's lost.

OK, so it's not really funny -- but neither is the seemingly endless capacity for idiocy from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its post-Katrina recovery efforts. From CNN, we have this vignette of the evacuations from waterlogged Louisiana:

"A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston.

"But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away.

It was not known whether arrangements have been made to care for the evacuees or transport them to the correct destination."

Johnny: Those firefiighters tapped by FEMA sure are busy ...

Audience: How busy are they?

Johnny: Too darn busy to do the jobs they're trained to do, that's for sure.

Again, not so funny. But consider this superfluous and clumsy homage to Johnny Carson a rhetorical flourish by which I can dredge up this gem from the Daily Kos about more FEMA lunacy. It seems a thousand Utah firefighters were assigned by FEMA to be -- what else? -- community-relations specialists in the storm-battered region.

Of course.

And their first assignment? To make 'em parade along with Dumbya to serve as a human photo-op backdrop.

"Bush is so thoroughly a PR vessel that he can't even tour a disaster zone without his human backdrop," Kos writes. "He's been a PR marionette for so long -- clear brush for the cameras! -- that he's become thoroughly incapable of keeping it real. ...That's not worth his time."

Actually, I think FEMA deserves as much of the blame as, or perhaps more than, the White House on this nugget. Agencies scurry around to meet what they perceive to be the wants of a commander in chief. While the Bush administration has certainly availed themselves over the years to every photo-op imaginable, the good people of FEMA should be taking the disaster recovery a bit more seriously by now than to dispatch a boatload of firefighters to play-acting.

Of course, there was plenty of play acting to go all around at FEMA, an agency in which the head honcho waited until Katrina was already well underway to ask for help from his boss at Homeland Security.

As AP reports:

"Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to 'convey a positive image' about the government's response for victims.

"Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged."

And no, Red Dirt (I know you're out there, lurking in the darkness), FEMA's incompetence surely doesn't excuse the obvious and serious failings of state and local authorities in the debacle that was Katrina. But national disasters are essentially federal operations, and in Louisiana -- as in Mississippi, for that matter -- it's becoming more and more obvious that this operation smacks of malpractice.

Shakespeare's Sister has an excellent sampling of FEMA's growing transgressions. Click here for it.