Never let a director of FEMA be appointed and confirmed without having the background of emergency management and that experience

Chimpy has finally leapt into action, declaring a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, although oddly enough for next Friday. If it takes 8 whole days to prepare for prayer (try saying that ten times fast), it can only be because FEMA is making the arrangements. (Update: the Poor Man finds some irony.)

Lou Dubose article on the eerily familiar failures of FEMA under Bush the Elder and the rebuilding of the agency by Clinton, who urged Congress not to let, ahem, future presidents dump their cronies, and college roommates of their cronies, on the agency: “In any future administrations, I challenge you as members of Congress to never let a director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency be appointed and confirmed without having the background of emergency management and that experience.” Dubose doesn’t mention the contribution of Ronald Reagan, who redirected FEMA’s focus away from natural disasters and towards building bomb shelters and preparing for the Reagan myth of a survivable and indeed “winnable” nuclear war, a myth Bush Senior believed in (Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, page 29). We heard a lot of dark muttering in those days about the Moscow subway system, in which Russians would huddle cozily until the radiation went away, emerging as the new Red Overlords of a world of mutated cockroaches, or something like that. FEMA was cheerily optimistic about its ability to cope with nuclear holocaust with, as Scheer’s title quote puts it, enough shovels. Here’s a FEMA report from December 1980: “With reasonable protective measures, the United States could survive nuclear attack and go on to recover within a relatively few years.” (p. 111) Not that that cockeyed optimism has completely gone away.