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Submitted Without Comment
2005.11.03 (Thu) 23:54

We've been reading the ongoing coverage of Michael Brown's complete and total incompetence, and we wanted to throw a few of the more choice tidbits on the table, on the off chance that someone might not have seen them. As reported widely, and quoted below from an ABC News story, food was high on Brownie's list of critical issues once Katrina hit New Orleans. Sadly, it was his own meal that seemed to concern him most. After being peppered with e-mails from FEMA representative Marty Bahamonde who was in New Orleans reporting on the criticality of the situation, the following was the reply from Brown's office:

...Brown's press secretary wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. "He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes," wrote Brown aide Sharon Worthy.

"We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you."

But food wasn't the only thing on Brown's mind. Apparently, clothing was right up there as well, as reported in another ABC News story:

The e-mails show that Brown, who had been planning to step down from his post when the storm hit, was preoccupied with his image on television even as one of the first FEMA officials to arrive in New Orleans, Marty Bahamonde, was reporting a crisis situation of increasing chaos to FEMA officials.

"My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous and I'm not talking the makeup," writes Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs to Brown on 7:10 a.m. local time on Aug. 29.

"I got it at Nordstroms," Brown writes back. "Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"

Hey, people are dying. Can I quit now? Can I go home? Ha! Jokes! It's the most humorous of situations!

Asshole. Want to see true incompetence in action? Check out the following e-mail exchange (PDF) between Bahamonde and Brown:

From Bahamonde to Brown on August 31:

Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical. Here are some thing you might not know. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes.

The dying patients at the DMAT tent being medivac. Estimates are many will die within hours. Evacuation is process. Plans developing for dome evacuation but hotel situation adding to problem. We are out of food and running out of water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.

Brown's reply:

Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?

You know, that sounds remarkably like an e-mail that might be sent from one Two Percenter to another, during the course of fine-tuning a Rant or constructing a Score entry. The difference? Other people's lives don't fucking depend on our timely reactions. Asshole.

So not only was this guy completely unqualified to do his job, but as this storm was developing, he decided to quit — probably because he recognized his own lack of qualifications — and his actions over the course of the storm quite clearly demonstrate that total incompetence and that unmistakable "I'm quitting anyway" attitude that ended up costing people their lives.

Thanks, President Bush, for putting this guy in a position of critical importance; and thanks, Congress, for failing to check this guy's résumé.

Okay, so maybe this wasn't submitted entirely without comment.


— • —
[  Filed under: % Bush Watch  % Government & Politics  ]

Comments

Grendel, 2005.11.04 (Fri) 18:19 [Link] »

It isn't necessary to paint Brown an asshole by data selecting out only those emails that appear damaging to Brown.

Give me the total set of anyone's emails, and I will be back in 5 minutes with my selection making them look like assholes. You, me, anybody.

Anyone who has ever hung around emergency personnel -as I have for over twenty years -will tell you that a certain black humor and feigned nonchalance is the norm. Ask any police officer, ER nurse, EMT, etc. You will hear tales FAr worse than what is found in Brown's emails.

Cherry picked emails tell us only what a person typed and does not convey context.

With all the genuine evidence of Brown's incompetence available, this email business is the cheapest, most juvenile, and most unnecessary.



The Two Percent Company, 2005.11.04 (Fri) 23:49 [Link] »

Yes, anyone can be made to look bad by citing specific examples from among all of their available e-mails, us included. In fact, while reading through the selection of e-mails to and from Brown, we saw plenty of e-mails that fell into the category of "stress relief humor," and we purposely didn't harp on those for that very reason. In addition, we've worked in high stress situations, and we know that without a certain amount of dark humor, we wouldn't have made it through. We have no problem with that. However, we completely disagree that this is the extent of what the e-mails that we've chosen to present here illustrate.

Let's look at the examples that we've chosen, and why we selected them:

  • Brown's administrative assistant whining about how he needs more time to eat dinner while people are urgently clamoring for his attention and telling him about a developing and already critical situation.
  • This isn't dark humor or stress relief — it's a person who couldn't care less about the job he's supposed to be doing or the lives that are being lost. Instead, he's having his admin run interference while he sits down to a nice dinner.

  • A quote in which Brown whines about quitting and going home.
  • To us, the damning part here is the revelation that he had decided to quit while the storm was on its way. It explains a lot about his performance if you factor in the "I'm quitting anyway" attitude.

  • After being told about specific emergency issues that were in progress at that very moment in a plea for help, Brown replied: "Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"
  • That isn't humor, and that isn't stress relief. That's incompetence. From what context could we have removed this in which it would have been an acceptable reply? Set all of the other e-mails aside and this one alone spells out Brown's total lack of qualifications or concern — indeed, interest — very clearly. If you think it's cheap and unnecessary to point out this piece of information, then all we can say is that we couldn't possibly disagree more.

So, yes, there are people out there harping on every bad joke and ill-timed quip that Brown made over the course of a few weeks — read the full list of e-mails, and you'll see the other examples we didn't mention. But we aren't doing that. We are looking at specific examples of incompetence, not off-color jokes. That said, we'd probably look far more kindly on any jokes if Brown had actually been doing his job while making them instead of fucking it up. If he had been joking about his wardrobe because he just worked an all-nighter and looked a little the worse for wear, we would've let him slide; but that was far from the case here.

Oh, and go check with an EMT on this for us: if they get a call from dispatch that spells out a severe emergency medical situation to which they need to respond — say, a major road accident with multiple casualties — do they reply by merely asking "Is there anything I need to do or tweak?" We've got a former EMT as a Two Percent brother-in-law — as he'll attest, jokes may be made to relieve the tension...but not at the expense of doing your damn job. Brown's incompetence, callousness and lack of qualification are no longer in question, and any e-mails he may have sent can certainly be considered in light of what we know of him already.



Grendel, 2005.11.07 (Mon) 17:29 [Link] »

You've taken the emails and assigned your own meanings to them. You need to know weverything to know the context. You may be correct, but if so, it's by coincidence.

Send me all your emails for the last month and in an hour I'll be back with all the evidence needed to paint you a fool. I could the same with anyone on the planet.

If Brown had not been appointed by Bush, you would give a rat's ass about him and you guy's take this sort of cheap approach only out of your burning hatred for Bush.

This is a skeptical and political blog. There are literally mountains of reasons to attack Bush on his anti-science agenda. Go for it. But for God's sake (pun intended), drop the cheap shit. You don't need it and it doesn't work.



The Two Percent Company, 2005.11.07 (Mon) 20:58 [Link] »

Grendel, your assessment of our motives is factually incorrect, and your assessment of the e-mails we used is, in our view, off base.

You've taken the emails and assigned your own meanings to them. You need to know everything to know the context. You may be correct, but if so, it's by coincidence.

We disagree. By your logic, we shouldn't comment on anything that anyone says unless we personally take part in or witness the exchange, since that's the only way that we could be even somewhat certain of the context. That makes no sense at all.

With regard to the e-mails that we chose, we again ask you: in what context could these examples be considered acceptable? The reason we ask is because if all reasonably possible contextual bases for the e-mails still render them unacceptable, then the context itself means very little to our overall discussion. Specifically, we'll focus on the last of our three examples: when Brown replies "Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?" to the increasingly frantic communications of the FEMA folks in New Orleans, precisely what context makes that acceptable? We can imagine a handful of contexts, and not one of them makes that response okay.

Send me all your emails for the last month and in an hour I'll be back with all the evidence needed to paint you a fool. I could the same with anyone on the planet.

Yes, we freely conceded this point in our last reply. In fact, we also mentioned that, if it had been our goal just to make Brown look foolish or insensitive, there were plenty of other e-mails in the publicized collection that we could have used. However, as we said, that wasn't our goal. Our goal was to look at specific examples of incompetence from Brown, not examples of foolishness or ill-timed jokes. And while you would surely be able to use our personal e-mail archives to make us look like fools, you couldn't use them to make us look as if we had egregiously dropped the ball in the midst of a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina, for which we were responsible. Perhaps Brown's e-mails are just a tad more important and revealing than ours.

If Brown had not been appointed by Bush, you would give a rat's ass about him and you guy's take this sort of cheap approach only out of your burning hatred for Bush.

That is 100% false, Grendel. First of all, we certainly do hate Bush. But get the sequence straight: we don't despise Bush's actions and words because we hate him; we hate him because of his despicable actions and words. There is a difference. Further, when and if Bush does something right, we'll give him credit; and when, for example, the Democrats do something stupid, we'll call them on it too. Case in point: our post about class action reform from earlier this year, in which Bush's agenda matched our own. We gave Bush credit for having the right approach, and called the Democrats into question for voting against the measures. We admit that there aren't a ton of examples of us coming out in favor of Republican activity — but we'd argue that this has more to do with how fucked up the Republican party has been lately than it does with any biases we may have.

See, we aren't Democrats, Grendel, and as such we don't back the Democratic agenda. We back an agenda based on common sense, logic, reason, and civil liberties for all. We also find ourselves lamentably locked into a two party system that we can't see a way out of any time soon. Since the Republicans seem to have gone off the deep end, we often end up looking like Democrats, but that's only because we have been forced into this "lesser of two evils" scenario. Don't assume any further allegiance to the Democrats or any further condemnation of the Republicans than that.

As far as Brown goes, we're frankly a little disappointed that you would actually think that the only reason we are harping on him is that he was nominated by Bush. That couldn't be farther from the truth. The guy fucked up in a major way, and no matter who nominated him, he deserves to be called on his incompetence. You certainly seem to agree that he is incompetent, so we have no idea why you'd think that we need to hate Bush in order to reach the same conclusion.

This is a skeptical and political blog. There are literally mountains of reasons to attack Bush on his anti-science agenda. Go for it. But for God's sake (pun intended), drop the cheap shit. You don't need it and it doesn't work.

You're correct — this is a skeptical and political blog. More to the point, it is a blog dedicated to critical thinking on all topics. We have spent plenty of time attacking Bush on his anti-science agenda, and we can guess that there will be plenty more of that to come. However, we also fully intend to continue to point out government incompetence in all its forms — not just the anti-science forms — and regardless of party affiliation.

If we had really called Brown to the carpet for his use of bad jokes in e-mail, we would be nodding at your critique and acknowledging our mistake (though not the motivation you've assigned). Hey, we get pissed off and sometimes fire off a volley that just might be too harsh, and we're not above admitting to an overzealous Rant if our emotions push us to that extreme. However, that's not what we've done here.

If you believe that the e-mails we quoted are potentially meaningless, depending on their context, all we can say is that we disagree with you. Provide us some reasonable contexts for them, and we'll gladly think your suggestions through. However, as we said, we can't see any context in which those remarks suddenly become acceptable, and as such, we will continue to point to them as examples of Brown's utter incompetence and Bush's (as well as Congress') culpability for putting him in his position as head of FEMA.



Grendel, 2005.11.08 (Tue) 15:48 [Link] »

"If you believe that the e-mails we quoted are potentially meaningless, depending on their context, all we can say is that we disagree with you."

This is exactly what I'm talking about. I don't know if the emails you quoted are potentially meaningless -but neither do you. That's the whole fucking point.

"Provide us some reasonable contexts for them, and we'll gladly think your suggestions through."

Ah, I see. The emails mean what you say they mean until and unless someone proves it different. How very scientific. Any idiot ought to know that taking random emails out of context provided by someone with an agenca and his own ax to grind is a certain pathway to error. Any idiot ought to also know that informing one's opinion are one's own responsibility. But no, you choose to take the juicy anti-Bush angle and stick with it unless someone can better inform you. (Admit it -you'd care not a whit about these Brown emails were he not a Bush appointee. That appears your only raison d'etre on the political side of this blog -hate Bush, hate Bush, hate Bush).

Look, you guys are so laughably blinded by your hatred for George Bush, you've lost total grip on objectivity or criticality of thought. You appear to chase two dogs on this site:

(1) Shooting paranormal fish in a barrel (Allison Dubois? Could you pick an easier target? you've 'killed' her several times now. Let it go. Geez, lol)

(2) And ranting behind anything that lends fuel to your hatred of George Bush.

I appreciate the time I spent here and our interactions, but there's just nothing worth hanging around for.

And this from a guy who doesn't like Bush either, lol.

Adios, fellas.



The Two Percent Company, 2005.11.09 (Wed) 15:29 [Link] »

Grendel,

The main delusion that you seem to be laboring under is that we have no context whatsoever for these e-mails from Brown. That is false. If you read the file of e-mails that we've asked you to read more than once, you will see for yourself that it is false. Let's once again look at the third example we used in our post to illustrate what we mean.

The e-mail from Brown is: "Thanks for update. Is there anything specific I need to do or tweak?" Based on your comments, Grendel, one would think that this e-mail was presented as a standalone message, and as such, we are totally ignorant of the context. If that was the case, you would be correct — we would be assigning a context (and hence a meaning) of our own to Brown's message. But that is not the case. Brown's e-mail is clearly a direct reply to another e-mail. The e-mail that Brown replied to is from Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA representative who was in New Orleans. Since Bahamonde has spoken at length about his e-mail, we know plenty about the context of his message. He has stated that he tried desperately to convey the critical status of the situation in repeated attempts to get Michael Brown engaged. His e-mail (which we quote in our Rant above) certainly appears to be such an attempt. Given that context for the e-mail exchange — which can be confirmed through various sources, such as the unexpectedly alert (in this case) mainstream media — we do not believe that there is any reasonable factor that might redeem Brown's reply and make it acceptable. Let's say that again — given what we know about the context of the e-mail exchange taking place, Brown's reply shows his incompetence quite clearly.

We have made this point several times, and you have yet to actually respond to it. You are free to disagree with our analysis above if you like (you haven't countered it yet), but we don't accept your assertion that we included the e-mail exchange blindly and out of hate instead of reason. The details above show that we took a rational approach, and not one blinded by hate.

So, despite your statement to the contrary, we're not saying that the e-mails mean what we say they mean until someone proves us different. If you calmed down a bit and tried to parse what we've been saying here, you would probably realize that. By asking you to provide a reasonable context in which Brown's third e-mail could be considered acceptable, we weren't really expecting you to offer one; more precisely, we were pointing out that, as far as we can tell, there is no such context. Given what is already widely known regarding the circumstances surrounding this e-mail exchange, there is no context that makes Brown's reply anything but incompetent and/or callous. That is the whole fucking point of what we're saying, Grendel. We're just sorry that you don't seem to be willing to understand.

In addition to your flawed arguments about the e-mails themselves, your assignment of motive to us is just plain incorrect. Sadly, you've decided to ignore our counterpoints, and instead just continue to insist that we are "blinded by hate." All we can do is shrug and repeat the fact that you are wrong. If you don't want to believe that, then you are free to hang on to your incorrect beliefs. Rock on.

Do we have an agenda? Yes, but it isn't the one you imagine. Our agenda isn't to shit all over Bush no matter what; it is to promote the application of critical thinking throughout the world (or, at the very least, among our readers). If that means that we call Bush's policies into question, so be it. If it means we call a Democratic Senator's policies into question, that's fine as well. We talk that talk, and we've walked that walk.

Your basic flaw, in our view, is that you seem to believe that because we don't like Bush, we therefore can't be objective. That's utter bullshit. If that was true, we wouldn't have given him props for his class action reform legislation...and yet we did.

Most maddeningly of all, you say:

(Admit it -you'd care not a whit about these Brown emails were he not a Bush appointee. That appears your only raison d'etre on the political side of this blog -hate Bush, hate Bush, hate Bush).

To just keep blindly insisting that we are "hiding" our true feelings no matter what we say isn't much of an argument. Seriously, Grendel, if you believe this nonsense then you're not only wrong, you're a hypocritical ass. Frankly, that's an approach we expect from a true believer trying to convince us to "admit" that we really do believe in Jesus, or psychics, or some other form of crap. It's just sad to see it coming from you. As you are most likely well aware, the reason this approach never works is because the accusation — and, by association, the accuser — is seldom correct. With your extensive experience dealing with true believers, we kind of thought you'd know that. We're just floored that you of all people would use this stupid, ineffective, and basically infantile argument.

For the record, and once again: We don't give a fuck who appointed Brown — his incompetence stands on its own regardless of his ties to Bush.

We're tired of repeating that to you, man. If you don't believe it, and if you think we're lying, then you're right that you shouldn't bother visiting our site anymore. Just don't expect us to suddenly fall to our knees and admit to something that isn't true. Fuck, Grendel, we expected a lot more from you than this line of silly shit.

All that said, we've noticed a muted version of this type of response from you in the past, but we never really pointed it out. Basically, you seem to applaud the application of common sense and rational thought when it comes to quackery and the paranormal, but you don't seem to apply the same thought processes to politics. In fact, you've become somewhat cantankerous in the past when we have taken that approach. Just check out some of our past comment exchanges to see what we're talking about.

You're quite welcome to not take the same approach to politics that you do to pseudoscience, but for our part, we choose to apply the same critical thinking and reason to politics that we do to everything else. We choose to call out bullshit no matter what arena we might find it in. To us, you seem to take more of a "What do you expect from politics?" approach. That's all well and good (and true), but that's not how we get down. While we don't expect common sense and reason from politicians, we still feel the need to call them on it when they set common sense and reason aside.

Toward the end, your comment descends into a dull whine about how pathetic we are that is, quite frankly, both hypocritical and inane. We didn't create our site in order to please you; we write about what interests us. We could probably say similar things about the content of your site, but quite honestly, we find this type of critique to be exceedingly vacuous. Any given site — yours, ours — is what it is because the authors want it to be that way.

It's worth noting, though, that one of the "dogs" you think we chase on our site is:

Shooting paranormal fish in a barrel (Allison Dubois? Could you pick an easier target? you've 'killed' her several times now. Let it go. Geez, lol

In fact, some people might think that you spend too much time "shooting paranormal fish in a barrel" on your site. Could we pick an easier target than Allison DuBois? Hmmm...how about Sylvia Browne? There's an easier target for you, Grendel. And gee, you just recently posted about her on your site. Does that mean that she isn't worth posting about? Does that mean that you should change topics to accommodate our hypothetical critique? Bottom line: if you don't like what we write about, then feel free to go somewhere else.

Besides what we stated above — that we write what we want to write — there is another flaw in your contention that we write too much about Allison DuBois; it is demonstrably incorrect. Of our 236 total posts, there are ten in the Allison DuBois Week collection. Of those ten, only seven have actually been about Allison DuBois (the others were conversations spawned by comments we got on those posts, and other such offshoots, but are not actually about Allison). And of those seven, the first five were really just one long Rant that we broke up into pieces to do a week-long series. So, basically, we've "ranted" about Allison a whopping three times in the year we've been blogging. That's hardly what any rational person would consider to be overkill. In the words of Ice Cube, Grendel: "You betta check yo self for you wreck yo self," because your assertion is not based on the readily available facts.

It is also worthwhile to note that a reader just recently commented on our latest Allison DuBois post:

Wow. This woman was totally off my radar before reading this. I'm thinking that her strategy is to discredit her cronies and free up their clients to come to her.

We point this out not to stroke our own egos, but rather to show that, had we stopped one Rant shy of our current total on Allison DuBois, then at least one less person would know what a bullshit artist she is. You of all people, Grendel, should appreciate the importance of countering bullshit for as many willing and intelligent people as possible.

It's sad to us that it's come to this. We've enjoyed your contributions to the site, and up until now we've had no problems with any of our past disagreements — you've always had a valid point to make, even if we've disagreed with you. Suddenly, though, you seem to have taken leave of your senses, and any continued discussion with you seems to be not only pointless, but also annoying. We're not in the habit of assigning motives to people, so we have no idea what caused this change; but if you ever get past it, we'd love to have you back.




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