The former FEMA director, who famously resigned from his role in 2005
over his disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, took the opportunity
on Wednesday to tell New Yorkers reeling from the hurricane this week
that everyone should just “chill.”
“Hurricane Sandy should teach us to be prepared, willing to live
without the modern conveniences of elevators, computers and
refrigerators,” he wrote in an editorial for Canada’s Globe and Mail. “Hurricane Sandy should teach us all to chill.”
It’s the second time in two days that Brown -- better known as
“Brownie,” the nickname given to him by George W. Bush – has told city
dwellers to relax in the wake of a storm that devastated the East Coast
and New York. In New York City the storm caused nearly 2 million people
to lose power, 22 were killed, and 100 homes burned to the ground.
Brown, who became a household name and punchline when Bush told him
“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job,” while he was widely seen to have
botched the emergency response to Katrina, first offered his advice in an interview with Fox Business yesterday.
“People are going to get frustrated – I’d just encourage people to just
kind of chill out over this whole situation,” he told host Charles
Payne.
“When you say chill out – what do you mean when you say chill out?”
Payne asked, laughing, to which Brown reiterated that it can take a long
time to restore power to certain areas and “If you’re the guy at the
end of the line, you’re the guy at the end of the line and there’s
nothing you can do about it.”
Brown defended his words in his editorial on Wednesday, arguing that
New Yorkers need to take the natural disaster as a sign to unwind and
learn to live without technology.
“Hurricane Sandy proved once again you can’t beat Mother Nature,” he
wrote, listing the effects of the massive outages that hit the East
Coast. “Seven million people didn’t have access to laptops, microwaves,
ATM machines, televisions, forced-air heating, subways and commuter
trains, and all the thousands of modern conveniences we have come to
depend upon in this hyper-technological society...So I would ask New
Yorkers and you: How long can you go without all of those conveniences? A
couple of days? A week? Two weeks?”
Brown has spent several days weighing in on Sandy, criticizing Obama
early this week for responding too quickly to the storm – accusing the
President of drawing too much attention to the federal response
efforts.
“One thing [Obama]’s going to be asked is, why did he jump on this so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly,” Brown told the Denver Westword on Monday. “My guess is, he wants to get ahead of it – he doesn’t
want anybody to accuse him of not being on top of it or not paying
attention or playing politics in the middle of it.”
The disgraced FEMA chief stood by his comments on Tuesday,telling Politico “In the context of the election, I simply said he should have
waited … The storm was still forming, people were debating whether it
was going to be as bad as expected, or not, and I noted that the
President should have let the governors and mayors deal with the storm
until it got closer to hitting the coastal areas along the Washington,
D.C.-New York City corridor.”
Brown also stated that while agencies like FEMA can provide aid during
these kinds of crises, the federal government is not as important as
other entities when it comes to disaster response.
“State and local governments are, as always, the true
first-responders,” he wrote. “So while the President goes to the
headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to show
he’s on top of the situation, governors and mayors are making the real,
life-saving, politically difficult decisions: who to evacuate and when.”
Obama’s handling to the storm drew praise from Republican New Jersey
Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday, who said at a press conference that the
President’s response had been “outstanding.”
Meanwhile, a senior Obama campaign aide slammed Brown for his comments
on Wednesday in light of his own botched performance during Katrina.
“It’s pretty rich coming from somebody who has an abysmal record on
management of emergencies,” campaign press secretary Jen Psak told CNN “I think the people of New Jersey, the people of Pennsylvania, the
people of Connecticut, where I’m from – my family was evacuated – are
happy that the President jumped in and moved quickly in response to this
storm.”
--courtesy the ny daily news
The nerve of The President to respond too quickly to what people have called the storm of the century, Our President can't do anything right.
(you can't see me right now, but I'm rolling my eyes)
1 comment:
Yeah I remember that our last president claimed that "Brownie" was doing a damned good job.
What a fucking idiot!!!
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