Summary of a reevaluation of Mike Brown and Katrina--via Josh Marshall

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has two posts which nicely summarize the reevalution of Mike Brown. On March 4, Josh wrote the following:

...I've been getting emails from folks on the inside at FEMA, people who worked with him and observed him firsthand when he was leading the agency.

The verdict seems pretty clear: None of them thought he was qualified for the position. But each also had the clear impression that he took his job seriously, learned a lot while he was there and -- perhaps most importantly -- was a big improvement over Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's fixer whom he succeeded as head of the agency.

The day before, Josh had a lengthy post in which he pointed out that while Brown certainly deserves criticism, Brown has shown that others who have previously ducked taking real responsibility deserve more blame than they have so far received:

I don't think there's any use or reason to reconsider the conclusion that Brown was manifestly unqualified to be the head of the country's emergency management agency or that he found himself in that job because of his longtime friendship with Joe Allbaugh, one of the president's fixers. He was either guilty of or implicated in various other instances of ridiculousness. He was a poster-child for the administration's essential lack of interest in effective government, as an aim of public service distinct from consolidating political power and paying off political supporters out of the public fisc. Also, for us critics, to the extent there is a Brownie redemption afoot, it is in large part because the same guy many of us lambasted six months ago is now flattering our assumptions about how this administration works.

Still, in this and so many other cases, our assumptions, always based on a lot of factual evidence, are being borne out in spades. And Brown is coming forward with a decent amount of evidence that even if he wasn't the guy who should have had the job, and even if he made plenty of mistakes during Katrina, he wasn't just bumbling along unaware anything serious was happening. If inept and blameworthy himself he seems clearly to have understood the magnitude of the catastrophe that was afoot and took steps to deal with it.

He also is coming forward with what appears to be a decent paper trail showing he had some sense and gave warnings about FEMA's degradation and decline under the consolidated DHS. No one listen[ed].

I can't see glorifying Michael Brown. He shouldn't have been in the job. He screwed up in a lot of different ways. He then carried the administration's water in trying to pin the blame on the locals, what must be a mortal sin in a FEMA Director. But he does get some credit for coming clean now and spilling at least some of the beans. And the beans he's spilled so far show that he's hardly the most blameworthy figure in the administration's shameful and pitiful response to the disaster that befell the Gulf Coast.

(emphasis added). Coming up--a review of the "paper trail" and other evidence.