More Clinton FEMA Failures

Read through this story closely; there'll be a one-question quiz at the end.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was missing in action when the Great Heat Wave of 1995 struck Chicago, killing more than 700 mostly poor, black and elderly victims who perished as city and state medical officials complained they were overwhelmed by the greatest disaster to hit the U.S. in the last 112 years....

By Saturday — just three days into the heat wave — the Cook County Medical Examiner's office was overwhelmed. "I've never seen so many dead people in a short period of time," Chicago paramedic Tim Walsh told the Associated Press.

After the first week of the disaster, the AP reported:

"Hospitals were jammed with the sick and the morgue was overloaded with the dead, with dozens of bodies arriving in a somber procession of blue-and-white police vans. Before [the week] was over, more than 450 people, mostly elderly and sick, would become victims of the summer of '95."

As the magnitude of the disaster unfolded, President Clinton seemed dangerously oblivious.

With Chicago's poor, black and elderly dropping like flies, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported: "President Clinton seemed unperturbed, going for a mid-morning jog and then playing 18 holes of golf in a threesome that included Judge Richard Arnold of Little Rock."

Change the word "Clinton" to "Bush," and how do you think the press coverage of this disaster would have been different?

Especially with this post-script:

Clinton's aid package turned out to be laughable by Hurricane Katrina's standards - $100 million to be distributed among 19 states. Illinois received a paltry $15 million.

Chicagoans were lucky to get that much. The Clinton administration had proposed cuts in the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, from which the heat relief money was drawn - only to be overruled by [the Republican] Congress.

Clinton's vaunted Federal Emergency Management Agency, under the allegedly able direction of disaster expert James Lee Witt - was nowhere to be found. [emphases added]

The mind reels....