Shots In The Dark

Michael Brown was hired as a deputy director at FEMA after being fired from a job supervising horse shows, according to this horrifying article from the Boston Herald.

For eleven years, Brown was the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association. Then, the Herald reports, "Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures." He was hired at FEMA by an old college friend.

Andrew Sullivan has repeatedly argued that the greatest failing of the Bush administration is its competence, and this farce certainly backs up that argument. How can a guy who got fired from a job running horse shows possibly become the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, especially in a post-9/11 world?

Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, argued in his book, The Price of Loyalty, that the Bush White House cared absolutely nothing about policy, because politics was all. Well, now we know the consequences of such disregard of the work of government.

And as I've mentioned before, if we can't control New Orleans, a relatively small city, in a time of crisis, how can we possibly maintain order in Iraq?

Larry Summers has announced that Harvard is setting up a fund for contributions to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Harvard will match contributions of up to $100, even if members of the Harvard community gave the money before the fund was established. Meanwhile, Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will each be accepting up to 25 students—tuition-free—who can't go to the school they were supposed to go to because of the hurricane.

While it's hard to fault Summers' intentions, these moves reflect an interesting and noteworthy shift in the traditional conception of the purpose of a university: teaching, learning, and scholarship. By committing Harvard as an institution to acts of charity and social outreach, Summers is clearly stating that he wants the university to be firmly engaged with society—as opposed to just the university's students and graduates. That will surely have some benefits, but it will also lead, inevitably, to the further politicization of the university, which has already happened quite substantially during the Summers' years.

An example: Harvard is a 501-c/3, tax-exempt, non-profit organization. Its alumni and others give money to it because they want to support Harvard's educational mission. Yet now Harvard is saying that it will redirect money contributed to it to victims of Hurricane Katrina—which, however altruistic that may be, is not why the original donors gave the money. Imagine if, for example, the American Cancer Society suddenly announced that it was matching gifts to the Red Cross for hurricane relief...

After 9/11, Summers set up a program of scholarships for children of victims who were accepted to Harvard. And after the Asian tsunami, Summers established a similar fund to match contributions. Which is generous, but then, it's not his money, it's the institution's—and one wonders if, in a sense, he isn't using it to promote his own public rehabilitation.

It also raises the question of what disasters reach the level at which Harvard should start sending money. Why not the children of Iraqi war veterans? (Hell, why not the veterans themselves?) Why not African AIDS orphans? Why not the children of slain Iraqi civilians? It does get hard to draw the line, once you start injecting the university into world events in such a fashion. I'd be very curious to hear Summers' response if someone asked him what his guiding principle was about the circumstances under which the university should match contributions for victims of a natural disaster. Perhaps Harvard should simply match all contributions to all charities?

The idea of accepting students from hurricane-closed universities makes more sense to me...although it'll be interesting to see if they get kicked out once the term is up.

Turned on CNN to hear them say that things are actually getting worse in New Orleans....followed by an ad for a GMC Yukon, which is about as big as the whale sharks I was snorkeling with and a lot less fuel efficient. Talk about throwing good money after bad. Perhaps General Motors—which may well be pushed into bankruptcy by these oil prices—should wait till gas drops below $3.50 a gallon to advertise the Yukon.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune suggests that the balance has tipped back towards order in New Orleans; finally, there's enough law enforcement there to start to reign in the chaos. Let's hope they're right.

Over at HuffPo, Randall Robinson claims that desperate survivors in New Orleans have been forced to eat corpses in order to survive. He doesn't cite a source, though. Could this possibly be true? I pray it isn't.

But if so, these truly are hard days in the United States. Recovering from Katrina is going to take a lot longer than however long it takes to rebuild New Orleans.

This holiday weekend isn't supposed to be so grim. It's supposed to be about family, friends, the end of summer. There's a pennant race on in the AL East, which is exciting and tense. The weather—in New England, anyway—is glorious. Labor Day is, at is best, a wonderful and relaxing time before the pace of life quickens with the beginning of school and the onset of autumn.

Of course, this year's going to be different; this Labor Day feels like a watershed. There's no good news from Iraq, and the story of the 950 people killed there in a panicky stampede is almost too sad to bear. The situation in New Orleans and Mississippi is horrific. This kind of thing—looting, graverobbing, banditry, corpses floating through the streets—is supposed to happen in the Philippines, or Bali, or some third world nation we don't pay much attention to normally. Meanwhile, on the highways, a different kind of looting is going on: gas stations charging anywhere from $3 to $6 a gallon for fuel they've already bought. (As one Rhode Island gas station attendant put it to me today, shaking his head in frustration, "That gas from the Gulf probably wouldn't have shown up here till January.")

And so far, our president has been disappointing—more the guy who looked dazed and confused in that classroom (tick-tick-tick, went Michael Moore's clock in "Fahrenheit 9-11," as the minutes dragged by and the World Trade Center burned) than the president who stood on top of a heap of rubble and called out inspirationally to the people working to clear the wreckage of the World Trade Center. It didn't help that the president was on vacation until he belatedly realized that this was one crisis he couldn't pedal through.

So this Labor Day weekend feels like a turning point. Towards what, I'm not sure. But I'd say that it caps a summer in which the Bush presidency has effectively come to an end. As soon as someone takes a poll, it will show that Bush's ratings have dropped to new lows...and he's already at record lows.

Of course, presidents can come back from dips in polls. And Bush may yet rebound to save face with the hurricane situation. But the president's real problems are twofold, and they won't go away: Iraq, and oil. We can't get out of Iraq any time soon, and we certainly don't appear to have any plan to win the war. And the huge jump in oil prices—wherever they wind up—is going to gut the economy.

Driving on the highway today, I couldn't help but look at the trucks rolling along and wonder how much more people would be paying to transport goods—costs which will invariably be passed on to consumers. I also couldn't help but smile a little bit as I watched people pull their SUVs up to the pumps. What does it cost now to fill up the tank of a Ford Explorer? $75? $100? I've never liked SUVs, so part of me is happy to see them suddenly become the bane of their owners' existence. The problem is that fatcat yuppies driving BMW and Lexus SUVs can take the hit. For working people driving trucks and vans they need for their jobs, this is going to be rough.


And the more people spend on gas, the less they'll spend on other goods. That's because Americans don't have a big cushion of disposable income; the poverty rate is at 12 percent, our savings rates are the lowest on record, and we're maxed out on credit cards and mortgage payments. It's not as if we can dip into our pockets for gas money until things get back to normal. In any case, "normal" may never be the same again. The era of cheap gas is almost surely over. And while in the long run that may not be such a bad thing, as a nation, we haven't prepared for that transition...which is kind of like building levees that can only withstand a Class III hurricane.

I don't mean to be gloomy, but we could be seeing the toughest times in this country in seventy years. Too bad our president's initials are GWB and not FDR.

The New York Times appears to be losing whatever patience it once had for President Bush. Today's editorial, harshly titled "Waiting for a Leader," blasts the president for his weirdly casual demeanor yesterday when addressing the hurricane victims. "One of the worst speeches of his life," the Times calls it. That's the second passionately anti-Bush editorial in the last three days.

I don't know if these editorials have any impact, but they are fun to read; it's nice to see the Old Grey Lady unleash her bark. More than that, they may reflect the nation's growing disillusionment with the president; it's just possible that the Times could be an outlier of widespread discontent.

From a political perspective, this hurricane is fascinating. Generally, hurricanes and other natural disasters are a godsend for a president. He can direct federal funds and relief supplies to the area, and easily look sympathetic and authoritative simultaneously. So far, Bush has come across as weak and slow. Stories of looting and carnage—rape in the Superdome? Jesus—create the legitimate impression that the government is overwhelmed. And I'm sure that, at some point, more and more people are going to make the connection between the number of National Guards-people overseas and the number of National Guards-people who are not in the hurricane-affected areas.

President Bush never told Americans that they were going to have to sacrifice for the war in Iraq...but now the sacrifice has come anyway. And that will make Americans wonder all the more just why we went into Iraq in the first place.

I'm immensely relieved to hear that my four cousins who live in New Orleans are safe and sound, and out of the city....though three of them are homeowners, one just a few blocks from Lake Pontchartrain. That part doesn't sound good. But that's nothing compared to their health and safety. Allen, Jen, George, and Mary—so glad you guys are okay.

The situation there is a little hard to comprehend, and I'm sure that we're not getting a complete picture from TV news. I was convinced of this when I received this forwarded e-mail from someone in New Orleans as of yesterday. I think I'll just let it speak for itself.

"I don't believe in Hell, per se, but the situation in the city of
New Orleans right now has got to be as close to hell on earth as it
gets. It's Biblical. Fucking apocalyptic.

"First there's the "water." It's black. It is sludged up with
everything washed up out of the sewer system from trash to feces to
urine, all the decomposing bodies that have floated up from every
single grave and crypt in the city, gasoline, rotten food, newly
dead animals, newly dead people, and God knows what else. It is, at
least in some places, flammable. I cannot even begin to imagine the
smell.

" In and under that water, which you can't see through, are snakes,
alligators, and swamp leeches. And live electrical wires. And
twisted glass and sheet metal. Oh, and there are balls of fire ants
floating around. The ants cling to each other in a ball to keep
from drowning, but when they make landfall on a structure, or a
person, they disperse. And dine.

"Now there are roving bands of thugs who have armed themselves to the
teeth by looting gun shops, and they are just walking around
shooting people. At night, there is no light, except for the light
from the fires that are burning in many places.

"And the water is rising."

It does raise the question: If we can't maintain order in a crisis in the United States, how could we possibly hope to do so in Iraq?

They're Jesus freaks who believe that in playing baseball, they are glorifying God.

The Sox, according to this article in the Boston Globe, have more evangelical Christians than any other team in baseball.

''This is our platform, our place to speak our faith and live our faith," pitcher Mike Timlin said. ''This is a special gift from God, to play baseball, and if we can spread God's word by doing that, then we've almost fulfilled our calling."

What a load of crap. As if God gives a damn that the Sox won the World Series. (If so, he must really love the Florida Marlins, who have, in their short existence, won twice as many World Series as the Sox have in the past nine decades.)

I wonder what Timlin, Curt Schilling, et al have to say about Johnny Damon's stripper wife. (Perhaps they've tried to "convert" her? She could be Schilling's only save of the year.) And I wonder if they've read the article in the new issue of Boston magazine about the well-known Sox player who was recently conducting a flagrant affair with a 19-year-old freshman at Northeastern University?

...did everyone see this NYT editorial about the administration's secret plan to trash them? One of Dick Cheney's former aides wants to open all the national parks to snowmobiling, off-roading, and other "recreational" activities. He also wants to sell religious literature there and strip any reference to evolution from park materials. And so on.

A couple of things about this...

First, the president needs to pay closer attention to what's going on in his administration. Even if he supports this, there's no real political gain to be had in such a plan. How many millions of Americans go to the Grand Canyon and love its pristine, unspoiled nature? And how many Americans really want to ride all-terrain vehicles in the Grand Canyon? I have to believe the first group is a lot larger than the second.

Second, Dick Cheney and the people who work for him have a very odd view of nature. Under his soft-spoken manner, Cheney is an extremist, and that soft-spoken manner only makes him more dangerous. My old colleague, Robert Sam Anson, is working on a book about Cheney's role in the Bush presidency. Anson's an old-school investigative journalist, and I can't wait for the book.

Third, how many other wacko right-wing ideologues are tunneling around in the depths of the Bush administration, making mischief in areas of policy that no one's paying any attention to while we're at war?

I missed a lot of current events while I was in Mexico, mostly on purpose; things are kinda grim right now—poverty rate up; gas prices up; national parks, under attack; killings in Iraq, up; Pat Roberston, advocating assassination; Bush vacation, still continuing—and sometimes you just need to take a break. Plus, it's hard to talk about US affairs while in any other country in the world, because everyone else just thinks the United States has lost its mind. (Funnily enough, just like they did when the GOP was making such a hoo-hah out of Monica Lewinsky....why does the GOP continue to do these things that make no sense to anyone beyond our borders?) I'm sufficiently a patriot so that I don't like to travel to another country and trash the United States...but on the other hand, how can you defend the Bush administration these days?

So, I took a break.

I eased back into politics last night by watching Cindy Sheehan giving an interview to Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher. There are times when I think Sheehan is loopy, or worse, like when she talks about "Palestine." But when she sticks to the subject of the war in Iraq, she is pretty impressive: thoughtful, hard to fluster, and moral without being preachy. She has two things going for her: she's honest, and she speaks common sense. You can tell, that's what drives the right-wingers nuts about her. She's not fancy, and she speaks the truth—her truth, at least. They want to discredit her, but it's not so easy to do.

I think that's what makes her such a powerful, if unexpected, counterpoint to the president. When he talks of Iraq these days, he's neither making sense nor being honest; it's hard to believe that even he believes what he's saying about all the terrific progress we're making there. Bush has a credibility gap, and his only response to the problem is to keep repeating the same rhetoric that worked in the months after 9/11.

It's enough to make me wonder what Karl Rove is up to...because a president who once showed such deft political skills seems to have acquired a tin ear. Meanwhile, Sheehan is acquiring a touch of Harriet Beecher Stowe—the little woman who, to paraphrase Lincoln, didn't start a war, but may be ending one.

...like when you write an entire post about Mexico, and it vanishes when you hit the "publish post" button, never to reappear.

So I'm going to see if I can muster the patience to rewrite that post, and in the meantime, here's a photo of a new friend I made in Mexico—in the Gulf of Mexico, to be exact. I'd guess he—though actually I have no idea if he's a he—was about twelve feet from wing to wing.