Brownie's Doing A Heckuva Job

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A couple of problems about Katrina are haunting the White House: 1.) Their reaction to the storm, and 2.) Their statements afterward.

Ex FEMA head Michael Brown (Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!) is being grilled by the Congress and he isn't going to be the fall-guy.

Top Department of Homeland Security officials were told that New Orleans was flooding just a few hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore, former disaster chief Michael Brown said Friday, contradicting previous statements by agency officials who said they did not know the magnitude of the problem until the next day.

“I find it a little disingenuous,” Michael Brown, who at the time headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told a Senate oversight committee. “For them to claim that we didn’t have awareness of it is just baloney.”

The comments came as a timeline of e-mails and reports complied by the committee showed that the federal government could have acted sooner to help victims of the flooding.

As with other controversies of late, the Republicans are asking hard questions and not just acting as White House apologists.

What's dogging Bush is a statement he made, which was later clarified when info started to emerge that indicated it was not quite accurate...and the White House response has been refined from there:

Shortly after the disaster, Bush said that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” He later said his comment was meant to suggest that there had been a false sense of relief that the levees had held when the storm passed, only to break a few hours later.

The latest White House explanation:
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president and his top aides were fully aware of the massive flooding — and less concerned whether it was caused by levee breaches, overtoppings or failed pumps, all three of which were being reported at the time.

Sounds like a Compassionate Conservative ...