Photo-ops and PR work! Even in the throes of the worst disaster this nation has ever seen, the Bush Administration continues to put image before substance.
While Americans were dying for want of water and food, or a little help from their government, FEMA was training firefighters in emergency PR work and photo-ops!
Photo-ops before lives! Michael Brown should be fired, but rumours are flying that Brown will be awarded the presidential medal for bravery and valor.
Are the four more years up yet?
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet." The firefighter .. declined to give his name because FEMA has warned [the firefighters] not to talk to reporters.
"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."
Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas. Read the whole thing.
Hat tip to MYDD
Katrina Bush FEMA Michael Brown Fire Michael Brown Firefighters
