Opinion: Bush FEMA director -- remember Brownie? -- charges Obama ignored gulf oil spill for political motive

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Michael Brown is the FEMA director who botched the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. On reaching New Orleans, George W. Bush famously said, ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,’ thus institutionalizing incompetence. (Later, Bush compounded the error by awarding Brown the presidential Medal of Freedom).

Brownie’s newest outrage? He told Fox News that President Obama deliberately waited nine days for the oil spill to worsen so he could pull the plug on the oil drilling he had just approved.

‘This president has never supported big oil, he’s never supported offshore drilling, and now he has an excuse to shut it back down,’ said Brown. ‘It’s pure politics.’

As White House press secretary Robert Gibbs pointed out Tuesday, there was no push back from Fox anchor Neil Cavuto, an editorial statement in itself. But how was Cavuto to know? After all, this is the conspiratorial line being offered daily by such conservative icons as Rush Limbaugh.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews used a far more skeptical tone, calling Brown ‘insane.’

As for Brownie, he now works as a ‘disaster recovery’ strategy expert for a firm in Colorado. Apparently he’s still blaming everyone but himself for the disaster within a disaster that he created by not getting food, water and shelter to the people of New Orleans, who were forced to cling to rooftops and abandon their pets and dodge looters to get food.

-- Johanna Neuman

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