Affirmative Action Republican Style

The buzz today has been about how president Bush and secretary Chertoff were warned about the potentially disasterous results of Hurricane Katrina and failed to take it seriously.

What struck me is how the more that is revealed about what actually went wrong the less it looks like ex-FEMA director Brown deserves all of the blame that was directed at him in the immediate aftermath of the storm. This disgraced expert in Arabian horses manages to make Bush and Chertoff look like the incompetent ones while he increasingly appears to have been one of a very small handful who grasped the potential for a serious catastrophe, even if he had virtually no practical or academic qualifications to manage anything to do with emergency response.

That Michael Brown was even nominated to head FEMA is proof positive that Republicans don't actually have a problem with the notion of Affirmative Action. For that matter, so too does the rise of George W. Bush in the world of politics. It's just that they prefer to practice it in terms of the Peter Principle.