Accountability-free zone

Via Josh Marshall, comes this Boston Herald (hardly a liberal outlet and rarely critical of conservative administrations) story Brown pushed from last job: Horse group: FEMA chief had to be 'asked to resign' (emphasis mine):

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.
And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

[...]

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

"He was asked to resign," Bill Pennington, president of the IAHA at the time, confirmed last night.

This clown couldn't manage a $%#@! horse show and he's been put in charge of the nation's most catastrophic natural disaster in history?!

Memo to the U.S. Senate: Isn't this is the sort of thing that your constitutionally mandated advise and consent function is supposed to prevent? Your dereliction of responsibility in asserting oversight over the executive branch is just as much to blame for this failure of leadership as is the administration that so cavalierly paid patronage to its political cronies by placing them in positions of responsibility for which they weren't even remotely qualified.

As for you Mr. Preznit, your action today to (finally) authorize the 82nd Airborne and other military outfits to respond to the crisis along the Gulf Coast is welcome, yet long overdue, news. I hope they are not just being sent down to Trent Lott's property to rebuild his house. Why did it take you 5 days to figure out that the level of response was inadequate when every news outlet, including GOPTV FoxNews was screaming since Tuesday "DC, we have a problem"?

I hold you, Mr Brown, the Senate and every one of your cabinet members who couldn't be bothered to interrupt their vacations to respond to the nation's most devastating natural disaster in history, all indirectly responsible for the deaths of those who were abandoned at the Convention Center for three days without food or water, for the nursing home patients that are just now being found dead after having being abandoned by their staffs, for every death that could and should have been prevented had there been an immediate response commensurate with the scope of the disaster as was immediately apparent to anyone with a TV within 24 hours of the end of the storm.

Culture of life, my ass.