Will FEBAR Bring Down the House?

With Friday's news that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown had been relieved of managing the storm clean-up, a bit of reality settled in to Washington. Brown, you probably know, is a man who couldn't manage a horse breeder's association, and yet who was waved through hearings by an eager Joe Lieberman. It was an admission that New Orleans had been Federal Emergencied Beyond All Recognition. But this action does not stop the growing scandal. According to Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post, five of the top FEMA officials "came to their posts with virtually no experience handling disasters," and the "ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the September 11, 2001, attacks."

The Katrina catastrophe and the failure of response - FEBAR - have primed the pump of a deep well, that of liberal and Democratic anger. It isn't just that traffic on liberal blogs has spiked. It isn't just that the images have been so shocking, the reality of a nation unprepared for disaster so outrageous. It is that it cuts in sharp relief how out of power the Democrats are, and what that really means.

The final outrage may have been the formation of a "bipartisan committee" without telling the Democratic leadership of either house, without assuring equal representation, and without giving bipartisan subpoenas power. Publicly and privately, Democratic office holders exploded. When Scott McClellan went through an entire press conference saying that "we shouldn't play the blame game" and the press did not challenge him, it was a sharp, stiff shock to the systems of more than a few representatives who at long last realized what, exactly, Rove's Republic meant to them.