A Year (Plus) Late and Billions of Dollars Short

It always amuses me to see an editorial that harumphs its way into stating the obvious. If the editorial in today's Washington Post hadn't been on a subject that involved the loss of hundreds of lives and made thousands of people homeless, I would be laughing my backside off.

But it did, and I am not laughing. After describing the tragedy of errors in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, WaPo sanctimoniously refers to the causes of the screw-up.

Although both Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Brown made mistakes during the storm, far more fingers should have been pointed at the haphazard, irrational and unabashedly political process that led to the creation of DHS, as well as the inept leadership of the department's first boss, Tom Ridge.

Four years ago, there was a case to be made for a government department that would group together different elements of border security -- the Coast Guard, the immigration services and customs -- in a more streamlined way. But, as the Post series documents, that wasn't what happened. Instead, White House officials anxious to prove their boss was more gung-ho about preparedness than congressional Democrats threw a lot of agencies together without much consideration of whether they belonged together, even at one point including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which carries out nuclear weapons research. Other agencies and tasks that should belong to homeland security, such as managing the nation's emergency vaccine stockpile, were left out. The result was bureaucratic redundancy and a mystifying command structure. One example: Even today, it still is unclear who in the government -- the White House, DHS or the Department of Health and Human Services -- is really in charge of defense against bioterrorism.

...By far the most disturbing aspect of the DHS saga is how familiar it sounds: After all, the administration's attempts to reform the intelligence services have been no less political, and apparently no less clumsy. It stumbled in Iraq for two years. Will incompetence be remembered as the salient characteristic of the Bush presidency? [Emphasis added]

Pulleaze...if it was so damned familiar, where were the articles, the columns, the editorials on the regime's incompetency last year before the election when it might have made a difference and saved the lives of so many residing on the Gulf Coast.

Morons.