Hillary's FEMA Boner

The only explanation I can come up with for this comment from the junior/senior senator from New Yorkansas is that she's getting all her gaffes out of the way before the '08 presidential campaign begins in earnest a year and half from now. Either that or she considers herself "bullet"-proof - which may well be the case, given Extreme Media proclivities.

2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was better organized to deal with disasters like Hurricane Katrina while her husband was president - an approach, she said, that was "rejected" by President Bush.

"FEMA was the lead agency during the Clinton administration; it was in charge," Mrs. Clinton boasted during a conference call with reporters. "James D. Witt, the director, understood how to deal with emergencies."

A detail that had a lot of us on the Right scared to death, given the perceived likelihood that the Clintonoids looked upon FEMA as a potential means of executing a Hugo Chavez-like takeover to keep Mr. Bill in power past the end of his constitutionally-alloted term in office. As it turned out, that gambit took the form of the Florida Insurrection instead, and damn near succeeded.

Apart from recent history, this clucking is very reminiscent of the "eight months trumps eight years" mantra the Dems employed during the public 9/11 commission hearings to hang blame for the terrorist attacks around Bush's neck instead of his predecessor's where it belonged.

And here too, recent history is something to which Mrs. Clinton really oughtn't be making such careless reference:

Though Senator Clinton touted former FEMA director Witt's experience, she made no mention of Raymond 'Buddy' Young, whom her husband appointed to the post of Southwest Regional FEMA Director in 1993.

Mr. Young, a former Arkansas state trooper, won the promotion after heading up efforts to discredit other state troopers whose allegations fueled the Troopergate scandal. Had Katrina struck during the 1990s, Young would have had jurisdiction over disaster relief efforts for New Orleans. [emphasis added]

Brother, wouldn't that have been a trifecta for the ages? An incompetent, finger-pointing mayor with symptoms of Touret's Syndrome, a hapless boob of a governor who doesn't know any end from up, and a Clintonoid good ol' boy crony whose idea of "emergency management" was letting his wanker boss and his trystmates know when the coast was clear.

Had Katrina hit on Sick Willie's watch, the federal response would probably have really been a disaster, even as the Extreme Media was depicting their hero as walking on water, plucking flood victims from the drink as he went. Not unlike how the Bush Administration's performance has been swift and effective (except where hampered by the locals) but the EM puts over their anti-hero as Heinrich Himmler exploiting the hurricane to turn the Big Easy into a concentration camp.

Hillary and Katrina actually have/had a lot in common. Both are/were spinning destroyers. Many more ill-advised boasts like this one and Mrs. Clinton may have to be taken down a category or two.

UPDATE: Oh, one more detail - Hillary voted for the Homeland Security bill that subsumed FEMA. Kind of like how John Kerry voted for the Patriot Act he spent last year denouncing and the Iraq war resolution he spent last year calling "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" before he voted for the $87 billion Iraq/Afghanistan appropriation before he voted against it.

Maybe she would have been better off challenging George Pataki in '02....

BEYOND UPDATE: Looks like James D. Witt's middle initial stands for "Dim":

Democrats led by Senator Hillary Clinton are blaming the Federal Emergency Management Agency for failing to respond adequately to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

But FEMA didn't do much better under much less taxing conditions, when the floods that followed Hurricane Floyd left tens of thousands stranded up and down the Eastern seaboard, wondering what happened to federal rescuers.

New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida were hit hard when Floyd slammed the coast on September 16, 1999. It was the worst storm to hit the U.S. in 25 years - yet it killed only 61 people. That death toll expected to be dwarfed by Katrina.

Clinton FEMA Director James Lee Witt won high marks for hurricane preparation, but the flood that followed swamped his agency.

A full three weeks after the storm had passed, "Rev." Jesse Jackson interviewed Witt on his CNN show Both Sides Now - and complained that flood victims were still suffering from a "misery index."...

Witt explained that the storm's devastation was unparalleled, prompting Jackson to ask what was being done for the thousands of families left homeless by Floyd.

Though nearly a month had passed since the storm first hit, Witt said his agency was just beginning to address the problem.

Actually, Witt's hurricane preparation marks weren't all that high after all:

The Clinton FEMA Director came in for more criticism during another CNN interview - this time for failing to do a better job with Hurricane Floyd evacuation efforts.

"I hate to do this to you so early in the morning," host Carol Lin began apologetically. "But I want to show you some video of Hurricane Floyd. This was the evacuation scene out of Florida last year. And you can recall, some three-million people in three different states were hitting the highways, jammed back-to-back trying to get away from the danger. And much of the local as well as the federal government was criticized for this backup. What is being done this year to prevent something like this from happening again, keeping people out of harm's way?"

Witt explained that evacuation problems were to be expected under such dire conditions. "It was very unusual when you had multiple states all evacuating at the same time," he told CNN. "It was the first time that that has happened that way and it did clog the highways."

Notice the kid gloves the reporterette used with Witt? Would she have given such polite deference to Bush FEMA head Michael Brown? Did Tim Russert tread on eggshells before getting in HLS Secretary Michael Chertoff's face and demanding his resignation on Press the Meat this past Sunday? And if either Bushie had offered up an answer equivalent to Witt's, wouldn't they have been torn limb from limb on camera for "making excuses" for what amounts to a failure of clairvoyance?

Just look at how the Extreme Media covered for its Clintonoid compadre:

While Witt's reputation remained largely intact after the Floyd fiasco....

In other words, it was allowed to remain intact because the press had no interest in stirring up "Floydgate"....

....more than a few of the storm's thousands of flood victims complained that the agency had failed them.

"I had heard FEMA was going to be downtown, so I got up early to get down there and get in line," one North Carolina woman told the Associated Press, recounting her ordeal months after Floyd had passed. "The time came and nobody was there, just all these people waiting in line." [emphasis added]

Gee, why did the AP wait "months after Floyd had passed"? Are they doing the same vis-a-vie Katrina? Don't think so.

FEMA's sorry performance left her overwrought.

"I had been let down so many times, I just lost it," the flood victim said. "A friend of mine came walking up, and I just started toward her. She said, 'Robin, what in the world is wrong?' I was just standing there in the middle of the street crying, totally disoriented, practically hysterical."

Weeks after Floyd's floodwaters subsided, the suffering for many had yet to be addressed.

"We passed hundreds of families sitting outside their now-uninhabitable homes, with their water-soaked possessions spread out on their lawns," the Raleigh News & Observer noted on October 3, 1999.

"Desperately picking through the mess for anything to salvage, most people -- particularly the elderly - seemed to be in a state of shock."

And where was FEMA?

"The larger towns had a visible FEMA and Red Cross presence," the paper said. "But in smaller towns it looked like utter confusion and despair - no one in charge, no one knowing what to do or where to go for help."

Sure sounds to me like the federal response to Hurricane Floyd was a big, fat failure for which Bill Clinton should have been crucified - at least according to the mind-bendingly absurd standards being applied to the Bush Administration by the same Extreme press that was perfectly content to wait for "months" to get around to telling the story of how James D[im] Witt's FEMA - of which Hillary Clinton boasts so obnoxiously - completely dropped the ball on that episode of disaster relief.

And Witt didn't have to contend with the bumbling of a municipal hellhole run by a potty-mouthed crook in a state legendary for its corruption presided over by a governor apparently bent upon redefining the frontiers of cluelessness.

As Louisiana goes, so will go America if the ex-First Gargoyle ever gets her hands on the presidency of the United States. If that nightmare comes true, we'll all be up the levee without a paddle.