Brownie Says Not Such a "Heckuva Job"

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- The Bush administration made a "fatal mistake" by talking up facts and figures without painting a broader picture of the obstacles in its widely criticized Hurricane Katrina response effort, ex-FEMA chief Michael Brown said Thursday.

Brown told CNN's Anderson Cooper that the talking points he and other federal officials used at the time didn't tell the whole story.

"They were factually correct, but weren't in context. We're moving all of this stuff in. We have teams here. Rescue teams are doing this," he said. "But we never explained to the people that it's not coming as fast as we want it to, and it's not enough, because of the number of people that were left behind in the aftermath of the storm."

Not making that clear was a "fatal mistake," Brown said.



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"Had I said that at the time, I probably would have gotten the old hook and been pulled off the stage anyway, but the truth would have been out," he said.

Speaking five years after the storm hit, Brown sharply criticized former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff's handling of the situation. Chertoff had attended an avian flu convention amid the disaster.

"Here is why that's so important. In the middle of any crisis," Brown said, "whether it's a natural disaster or man-made disaster, you need to have one person in charge. And that person needs to be on the ground with the team, understanding what's going on."

The former FEMA head told CNN that he winced when President George Bush said the now infamous line, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

"I knew the minute he said that, the media and everybody else would see a disconnect between what he was saying and what I was witnessing on the ground," Brown said. "That's the president's style. His attitude and demeanor is always one of being a cheerleader and trying to encourage people to keep moving. It was just the wrong time and the wrong place."

Brown headed FEMA under the Bush administration and resigned in September 2005, two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and 10 days after President Bush famously complimented him.

Chertoff was criticized by a House committee in 2006 for choosing Brown to lead the government response, despite inadequate training.

"If I knew then what I know now about Mr. Brown's agenda, I would have done something different," Chertoff said.

Hurricane Katrina's fifth anniversary is Sunday.

Brown, who is now on KOA-850 AM in Denver, Colorado, was in New Orleans this week broadcasting his radio show.

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Finally, at long last, U.S. combat troops have pulled out Iraq!

U.S. Combat Forces Out of Iraq

Capitalism in its Many Forms

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies,
and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

ENRON CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed
company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the
bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five
cows. Milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a
Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. NewsCorp buys them for an inflated price. They eat
clover for months and produce nothing. Rupert gets annoyed at another one of his children.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them world-wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows. Both are mad.

A ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but do not know where they are. You break for
lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You worship them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute...

Mosque Hysteria

All right again already, the hard line right wing of the Republican party, as if insecure about its position heading into the November mid-term elections, tries in its desperation to make political hay of a non-issue, i.e. whether to let a mosque open a few blocks from "Ground Zero."

We are confident the American people will see through this political prank, stand up for the Constitutional protection of religious freedom in America, and support the backers of this proposed mosque in their effort to build a place of worship where they see fit, in keeping with local zoning ordinances.

While the amount of public air time wasted on this meaningless debate will be a source of amusement to many of us, it also raises concerns about the depths to which our political discourse has been reduced through demagoguery, charlatanism and Bush-think.

Food for Thought

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken